The Shady Side Of Florida (Native Tongue - Carl Hiaasen)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Native Tongue - Carl Hiaasen
Date:	04/08/04 (148 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good descriptions of Florida

Disadvantages: some

Think: FLORIDA! What comes to your mind? Palm trees, sandy beaches, turquoise water? That wouldn´t be wrong but according to Carl Hiaasen (pronounced: hiya-sun) only one side of the medal and certainly not the side he´s interested in.

Hiaasen, born (in 1953) and raised in Southern Florida, a (good-looking!) journalist of the Miami Herald, is more interested in exposing schemes to destroy Florida´s ecosystem and natural beauty by bulldozing hitherto untouched land to build theme parks, holiday resorts and/or golf courses. He fights (from the net) ´greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, dumb blondes, apathetic retirees, intellectually challenged tourists and militant ecoteurs.´ He does this not only in his by-weekly newspaper columns but also in his environmental thrillers which are - despite the serious subjects - bizarre and farcical, of a kind I haven´t encountered before.

In Native Tongue we´re taken to the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills whose owner has obtained the last two surviving specimens of the blue-tongued mango vole, Microtus mango, rat-like rodents, not because he´s a do-gooder, oh no, but because he wants to compete with Walt Disney World, his arch-enemy, where the idea to do something for endangered species was born to attract more visitors, mainly though because the government give him 200 grand for his efforts.

The chairwoman of the Mothers of Wilderness, a militant group of ecofighters, all retired and stinking rich, a grandmotherly lady with a nervous finger on the trigger of her gun (she shoots at people who contradict her) hires two dumb burglars to steal the animals as a sign of protest against the destruction of the area by developers. Everything goes wrong and this sets an action in motion which is unbelievably crazy, results in some bizarre deaths (the head of security drowns when oversexed Dickie the Dolphin´s schlong [Buy a dictionary of American slang if you don´t understand this !] presses him under water. Killer Whale Orky kills the biologist responsible for the ratty rodents because he wears green etc. etc.) and even gets the Mafia involved.

Remember the title? Native Tongue, well, the tongues of the blue-tongued mango voles are not blue by nature but by brushing them regularly with indigo food colour, to be precise the animals are no mango voles at all, can´t be because this species has never existed, they have been made up by two goons.

Goons there are in abundance, No 1 being the owner of the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, a former snitch, now on probation living in Florida with a new identity. Even if it were the thing to do it would´t be easy to retell the plot, but it doesn´t matter really, the author seems to have constructed the plot only so that he could introduce some weirdos. The goodies aren´t much better, either. The ´hero´ is Joe Winder, a former investigative journalist (Hi, Mr Hiaasen !) who has fallen out of several jobs, the last one at Disney world for making love with an attendant on a carousel or roller-coaster, anyway somewhere in public. He´s now the PR man for the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills and has to bend the shocking news from this establishment until they sound perfect for the hungry press. His girlfriend does phone porn for which she writes the texts herself and reads them to Joe for approval; his accomplice is an ex-governor of Florida who?s been living in the jungle for years feeding on animals killed in road accidents and wearing the (still working) electronic collar of a panther run over by a lorry. Let me stop here, I think you get the picture.

The odd characters are the reason why people buy Hiaasen´s thrillers or so I read on the net. Native Tongue won the Crime Writers´ Association ´Last Laugh´ Award in 1992. It is funny if you like this kind of humour, I´ve found out that I don´t, ´not my beer´ as the Germans say. I like bizarre, very much so indeed, but this Florida-style bizarreness is too gross for my liking, the language - Native Tongue the second! - too vulgar; vulgarity for vulgarity´s sake is cheap and doesn´t please me. An amazon customer writes, ´Vintage Hiaasen. Rich, colourful, and full of those moments where you laugh out loud and upset the wife.´ Very telling, this! So Hiaasen doesn´t write for female readers? I can indeed see and hear male pub crawlers talking about the book and quoting phrases to each other better than women conversing enthusiastically about it. I´m sure no Hiaasen book can ever bring me ´close to hysterical laughter´ which another amazon customer experienced, so I won´t read another one, not my wavelength.

If you´ve got Hiaasen´s wavelength, then you´ve certainly got perfect reading matter for your hols (vacation!) in Florida, he describes the landscape accurately and lovingly. But you should buy his books at home! Some years ago my husband and I were in Miami Beach, when I felt like browsing through a bookshop we couldn´t find any. I asked the woman at the reception of our motel where there was one in our vicinity. She gawked, scratched her head and said, ´That´s a tough one!´, took out the street map and after close inspection found one at last, she then sent us to a shopping mall three miles away! I´d rather not comment on this.

Native Tongue
PAN BOOKS
6.99 GBP (amazon 5.59)
502 pages (I should have listened to my own advice!)

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