- Paperback: 213 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (22 May 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747547726
- ISBN-13: 978-0747547723
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,385,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
"On days like this he blamed it on the duck": Richard Beard's novel The Cartoonist announces itself in typically elusive, and comic, style. It is Frank Babbitt, supervisor at Yurayama amusement park, who suffers from the "duck" inside his head: "It was a kind of generalised anger unable to express itself, a modern strain of madness inflamed by telephone queues, and traffic jams, and lunatic technology." As the novel opens, Babbitt is conducting interviews for various openings at the park, following a well-worn script: "No-one overweight. No visible tattoos, facial hair, or over-sized ear-rings". He is confronted by one Michael Miller, a man with a false leg and an artificial hand who describes himself as a "dreamer dreaming the dream": a perfect employee for the closed world of Yurayama where language, and experience, is forced to work on behalf of pleasure and profit ("'What do we call queues?' 'Pre-entertainment areas.'"). Against these two, and the nightmare of Yurayama, Beard poses Daniel Travers and the sexual, and rebellious, allure of his cousin, Daphne. Travers meditates on the potential of cartoons: "Exaggerate, squash and stretch, but at all times make sure the drawing remains solid. As for the action, anything can happen". (That could be a description of The Cartoonist itself.) Like Daphne, Travers is also a mouthpiece for the book's vision of corporate and consumer hell: "Buy the hat, the shades, the soundtrack. Disaffection was widely available, almost everywhere, even in Woolworth's." At once witty, and vengefully serious, The Cartoonist is a novel that careers towards its exhausted, and unsettling, conclusion--and casts a host of criticisms and characters along its way. --Vicky Lebeau
Guardian 14th July 2001
'Beard is very funny on the logic of the theme-park universe...and his anit-consumerist political jabs hit a very hot button.'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
The Cartoonist, Daniel Travers, somehow thinks he can hide from life and perhaps its harsh, subtle, corporate manipulations. Daniel's cape of choice, his camoflage is that of a dumb, slow, unthreatening persona. From this "comfortable" position he is able to use his cartoons as the stick to poke fun at the cynically deceived world around him.
That is until he meets his "errant" young cousin. With more than a hint of forbidden sexual exploits to come, the author taunts Daniel Travers and the reader, the story unfolds...An innocent day trip to a certain amusement park outside of Paris is funny and shocking.
The author prods the reader with hilarious, yet incisive insights into the relationship between you the consumer and Them the company, the controller. The controller of not just my consumer preferences but more sinisterly, them the owners of the words that make up my very language.
Sharp, clever use of words, thoughts and theories, left me delighted and uplifted. This book might be even better than his first, X20.
Format:Paperback
I loved Richard Beard's first two books, X 20 and Damascus. The Cartoonist starts off even funnier than the first two, but then gets darker.
In fact, I found the ending quite disturbing. The Cartoonist is set mostly in a fictional theme-park called Yurayama, which is also a kind of satire on the European Union. Half-way through the book, it becomes clear that Yurayama is actually Disneyland Paris, only Beard isn't allowed to write about Disneyland Paris because of copyright laws. From this point the book is always on a kind of legal tight-rope, never mind the tension in the story itself, with the main characters conspiring to sabotage the theme-park's costume character acts.
If you like your fiction a bit different, and to be made to think, then give this a try. I can't wait for whatever Richard Beard does next. Definitely five stars.
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