It's unusual all right..., 18 Feb 2004

By	Dr. Kenneth W. Douglas "drkennydouglas" (Glasgow) - See all my reviews

The novel is set in a fully-realised and densely enveloping parallel Earth, where the geography is different but international power inequalities are the same. Tristan Smith is born, with short-limbed dwarfism and severely cleft lip and palate, to an actress mother in the third-world tropical archipelago of Efica. Spurned by many on account of his appearance, he is raised with hopeful love by his mother (with the help of three very different surrogate "fathers"), until she becomes involved in political activities against the capitalist superpower Voorstand: the Voorstander equivalent of the FBI then fakes her suicide. Tristan and one of his three fathers now travel to Voorstand as illegal immigrants to seek their fortune: once there, Tristan (dressed in a cartoon mouse suit to conceal his deformities) takes an unwitting but effective revenge on Voorstand high society.

Clearly this can be read as political satire, with Voorstand as the U.S.A. and Efica as the archetypal third world nation; but this is only one of Carey's concerns in this strange and complex book. The novel has all of Carey's usual thrilling pessimism (in the sense that he tells it like it is), but has a more upbeat ending than most of his fiction. Tristan and his mother are both very movingly drawn, and his three fathers are equally fine creations in their different ways. Probably a love-it-or-hate-it book, but I'd strongly urge you to give it a go.

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