This is a wild, hilarious ride, (Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Date:	08/03/01 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Characterisation; A wickedly accurate description of an extremely improbable type of person; A

Disadvantages: Scene- setting; New Orleans was never like this before, or ever I suspect; C+

Once, I gave a friend a copy of John Le Carre's The Naive and Sentimental Lover, on the grounds that he was very likely to grow up into something resembling the central character. If you recall Shamus from this- it is good, but ought to be heavy going for most- you will realise that was not entirely a complement. Then he sent me a copy of this, on much the same grounds. Score 1-0 to him, and rather spectacularly at that.

This is certainly not science fiction- it is set in the the real- world seventies, in New Orleans- but it may well qualify as fantasy, and considering just how cracked and removed to their own little worlds everyone is, it is definitely speculative fiction.

The central character is Ignatius O'Reilly, a mediaevalist, a working class child made very bad indeed- he went to university, did very well, got his Master's, and found it completely unfitted him for twentieth- century life and, more to the point, employment. In the course of the novel he holds down two jobs, briefly; in the first as a file clerk- essentially the same job I am doing at the moment- he costs his firm a half- million dollar lawsuit by answering a business letter off his own bat in addition to turning the place upside down with sheer strangeness, and then finds himself working as a hot dog vendor dressed in a pirate costume, which seems an entirely fitting kind of thing to happen to a man of his stamp. He is grandiose, melodramatic, prone to very strange enthusiasms and overall, if he were not so intrinsically ridiculous, about as safe to be in the vicinity of as a bubbling volcano. His mother is, depending on which way you want to look at it, a tragic figure or a raddled alcoholic old trout. They are both, in their way, very sound characters, and both extremely funny.

Both intensely disapprove of one another's lifestyle, especially when she shows signs of considering remarrying the poor, hapless Patrolman Mancuso on the freak- patrol. H
is duties involve dressing eccentrically and pretending to be one of the crowd in order to trap them into something illegal- this at the end of the hippie era. He is a character who can both excite sympathy and schadenfreude on the grounds that he deserves nothing better. The rest - the stripper, the local bar owner, the wisecracking union-rule-quoting underpaid black who ends up sweeping floors for her - colourful is an understatement. This is part farce, so they are all exaggerated, but the flaws they are exaggerated from are masterful.

Lurking in Ignatius' background is Myrna Minkoff, a nymphomaniac who could hardly be said to be more at odds in terms of basic position; she wants to revolutionise the world by getting everyone to love each other. I am sure he would have and probably has argued that that is precisely the wrong term, 'f*ck' being far more appropriate. What is even worse is that he actually starts to agree with her, and forms a plan to organise the local freaks into a revolutionary political party; which goes hideously wrong, as you might expect from total cultural opposites. This is a wild, hilarious ride, which has attracted favourable comment from such luminaries as Burgess- apart from this of course. It serves as a salutary warning to staid formula SF just how odd reality can be.

Imagination; more audacity than anything else- B+
Weirdness; ideology and pragmatism in conflict; much strange consequence; A
Scene- setting; New Orleans was never like this before, or ever I suspect; C+
Characterisation; A wickedly accurate description of an extremely improbable type of person; A

Overall; I will get Ben for this, I swear; A-

Summary: