Terry Southern's "The Magic Christian" (The Magic Christian - Terry Southern)

Member Name: jbsabbath

Product:	The Magic Christian - Terry Southern
Date:	17/07/09 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny scenarios, enjoyable dialogue and descriptions

Disadvantages: Not really a novel, no real beginning nor a conclusion

"When not tending New York holdings, Guy Grand was generally, as he expressed it, 'on the go.'"

Guy is a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world, and he's out to prove one thing: that everyone has his price.

With millions and millions of dollars at his disposal, he sets out on a number of ridiculous escapades to study the effect money has on people, but moreso to teach people a lesson, that the morals and stiff upper lip so many adhere to is merely a front.

Offered enough money, even the most righteous and devout will break.

While chatting absently with his two aunts Agnes and Esther, along with friend-of-the-family Ginger with her Pekinese Bitsy, we marvel at the man's exploits as Guy Grand challenges the American dream with hefty amounts of green.

From forcing a mouthy pedestrian to eat a parking ticket for six thousand dollars, to paying off a wealthy and influential dog breeder to enter a hungry black panther into a Crufts-like Best of Breed competition, only for it to attack and eat the competition, no one is safe.

There's his forays into the car industry, producing four Black Devil Rockets, giant convertibles with slogans such as "From stem to stern she's a flat one hundred feet! Ladylike lines on a He-Man hunk of car!".

Not to mention being the last of the grand gourmets, Guy visits the world's most exclusive and expensive restaurants, straps himself into a chair with a plastic smock and then proceeds to shovel the food into his mouth with his bare hands before racing to the kitchen to compliment the chef.

Then there's his least-pretty of ventures, involving filling a vat with three hundred cubic feet of manure, a hundred gallons of urine, and fifty gallons of blood, and then proceeding to drop into the vat "ten thousand one-hundred-dollar bills, slowly stirring them in with his wooden paddle", inviting members of the public to come and take a dip.

Of course, his greatest stroke of genius was in the creation of the SS Magic Christian, a fantastic state-of-the-art cruise liner for the rich and wealthy - the season's must-have holiday.

Only the passengers are not having a fun time, they are fooled into believing terrorists have taken over the ship, forced through a lifeboat drill with faulty life jackets that inflate to fill the whole room, faced with collapsing furniture, and not to mention a flurry of unsavoury characters, including a gigantic stark naked bearded woman running through the ship.

The whole voyage becomes a vast torture chamber for the snobs and American rich.

Guy Grand is the billionaire hero who shows the crumbling society for what it is, while being someone we all wish actually existed.

The novel was first published in 1959 and was made into a film ten years later starring the legendary Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.

"The Magic Christian" has always been one of my favourite films, much to the chagrin of many of my friends as they all seem to think it's rubbish, and I never knew it was based on a book until a few weeks ago when I picked it up in a shop.

It has to be said, it was something I just had to read, and weighing in at less than 150 pages I had finished it within twenty four hours.

"The Magic Christian" is exceptionally easy to read, Southern's no-nonsense style of writing making all of Guy's escapades seem like everyday occurences rather than absurdities.

Using Guy's aimless chats with his aunts as a backdrop, from which each chapter can leap into yet another adventure, the book never gets boring as we never linger for too long anywhere in the novel.

But then, even though the dialogue is brilliantly written and the novel is very entertaining, "The Magic Christian" is hardly a 'story' as such, not having a beginning, middle and end and having no real plot to speak of.

Even Guy Grand remains much of a mystery throughout the novel, never explaining his actions and forcing the reader to make his or her own conclusions about his motivation - for most of the novel we are *told* what happened, rather than experiencing the adventures first hand.

In this way, the novel is perhaps most like Voltaire's "Candide" or R.E. Raspe's "The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen" in style, all of which are similarly easy to read.

Ultimately, Terry Southern's "The Magic Christian" is an interesting piece of work but it certainly won't appeal to the masses, much like the film won't, which is a shame given its amount of originality and good, honest fun.

[The book can be purchased from play.com's PlayTrade from £10.24 (including postage and packing), at time of writing]

Summary: Amusing novel about Guy Grand, the richest man in the world - a fun read