Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès' ISLAND OF POINT NEMO (Tr Hannah Chute)

Was Hagbard Celine your bad literary boyfriend long before Hubertus Bigend burst on the spec fic scene? Is "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" your problematic fave? Was your favorite bit of Jodorovsky's The Holy Mountain the roll call of evil tycoons? Were Jules Verne's books not quite as Jules Verne as you were expecting? Do you care about mustaches? How about ebook readers?

Or, to be more succinct, do you like having fun when you read? And what is French for "fnord?"

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (who, are all Algerian-born authors simply amazing, or what? Admittedly, my sample size is a bit small, but still...) decided the answers to all of these questions was yes and decided to go them all one better and throw in a pigeon with a hilarious name here and there for good measure. 

Speaking of names, get a load of these: Martial Cantarel (dandified man of adventure), his pal Shylock Holmes (who solves crimes with the aid of a genius African butler with a big secret,  Grimod, in the mode of his famous grandfather, Sherlock), Inspector Scummington (of Scotland Yard, of course), French tobacco farmer Arnaud Méneste (whose personal bankruptcy -- after making cigars every bit as good as Cuban ones but since they're grown and rolled in France they have no exotic appeal to French smokers -- enables a Chinese syndicate to buy up his ancestral farm to set up an ebook reader factory), and Wang-li Wong, aka Monsieur Wang (the scopophiliac overseer of the ebook reader factory that arises from the unburnt ashes of the tobacco farm and the fancier of the pigeon with the hilarious name)... And there are more.

The action kicks off with an apparent murder mystery that may be connected to the theft from a Scottish castle of the world's largest diamond. While that thievery might be enough of a mystery to get things going, there is also the matter of three severed and saponified human feet,  each still encased in elaborate sneakers of a make and brand that do not exist, that have washed up on European beaches. No sooner are Cantarel, Holmes, Grimod engaged by the diamond's former owner (and Cantarel's baby mama) than one of the probable former owners of one of the severed feet turns up spectacularly and publicly dead and the gang is following an ingenious clue to Siberia! To which they travel in mind-bending luxury!

Meanwhile, a wife desperate to please and be pleased by her impotent husband resorts to desperate measures that result in improbable sentences like "His penis looks like a butcher's joke, a microphone made of bratwurst, ending in a big ball of calf liver." So, uh, content warning for bawdy humor though it's no worse than what you'd find in, say, The llluminatus! Trilogy.

I did not evoke Hagbard Celine in jest.

But this isn't much of a conspiratorial romp, nor is it merely a detective story, for all its trappings of both. Roblès has more on his mind than that, and he's been reading his Baudrillard, or at least his Umberto Eco, as we see when the action brings us to Tianducheng, China and an idealized,  hyperreal, scaled down version of Paris located there, with all of the City of Lights' famous sights and views perfectly reproduced but more conveniently situated, closer to one another "as if some genie had fulfilled a weary tourist's wish to shrink the city." It's carefully filled with all the expected cliches to populate the architecture, too:

Hundreds of white-skinned extras thus contributed to the authenticity of this immense garden of acclimatization, the designers having spared no expense. Among all these exhibitions of outdated and lost scenes, one display invariably provoked contemptuous chuckles -- that of a bookstore* reconstructed according to the best sources, in the image of those that existed before the digital divide that had finally stamped them out. Inside were fake readers around fake spindly booksellers who sorted piles of fake books.

If this doesn't make you think of Jim Munroe's bitterly awesome Ghosts With Shit Jobs, you really haven't been paying attention, have you? I, for one, can absolutely read the characters from this film as those less fortunate and left behind in North America while their more attractive or better connected relatives made for the bright lights and hyperreal sights of China.

Our trio of detectives and the diamond's owner, the lovely Clawdia MacRae, who happens to have had a daughter out of wedlock by Cantarel and has brought her along for the adventure despite said daughter being comatose (!), wind up traveling the world in grand Edwardian style, which is an odd thing to be doing in a novel that also explicitly contains things like ebooks and the internet and other modern technologies, encountering an array of perversions that would make Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson gush with glee as they follow the trail of the three right feet and the diamond. I had a theory about the anachronisms that kept characterizing their story -- the other plotlines in Island of Point Nemo are deeply concerned with storytelling, particularly with oral storytelling in the form, chiefly, of workers designated to read newspapers, essays and novels to their co-workers on the work floors of cigar factories and, later, the ebook factory, to keep them entertained through their drudgery and also to enlighten them (and thus make their overlords a bit less conscience-stricken at how their comfort and enrichment is paid for by that drudgery). I turned out to be right, at least in more ways than I did wrong, which was satisfying.

Where they end up is as incredible and unexpected as any reader could wish, among circus performers, zoo animals, and renegade scientists who have a firm belief that any small repair a person makes to the world is worth doing, even if it's just replacing a bulb in a street light.

A word, as always, about the translation: Hannah Chute had better have been well paid for the effort this must have taken; the English text is so rife with unusual locutions and near-neologisms that one would think Gene Wolfe had had a hand in it. I am a person of a certain age and fairly widely read, but some of the vocabulary (favorite example: "apocolocyntosis") appearing in Island of Point Nemo had me very glad to have an ebook version of the text and thus the ability to immediately look up the dizzying array of references and the unfamiliar words that kept cropping up. I felt like a naughty teenager again, leafing madly through the scandalous pages of the Illuminatus! Trilogy and other RAWiana with a real-life encounter with Robert Anton Wilson still in my future. I wonder if Roblès has a similar anecdote lurking in his back-story. Wouldn't that be delightful?

What is less delightful is pretty much the whole Monsieur Wang storyline. I labeled him a scopophiliac earlier, but he is also a gross sexual harasser of his employees, some somewhat consensually, some decidedly not. If you haven't been scared off by the wilder sex scenes in the other storylines you might take this in your stride, but as someone who rolls her eyes and taps her foot through this sort of thing, well, I guess we're supposed to hate Monsieur Wang anyway? Silly name notwithstanding?

Regardless, I am fairly certain this is going to end up being one of the weirdest, if not the weirdest, books I'll read this year, but then again, it's only February. From the French. What's yet in store? Stay tuned... I'm about to read some French young adult fantasy.

*This has to be a reproduction of Shakespeare & Company, right?