The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 August 2009
by Eric Idle
Idle, as most people know, is a member of that zany troupe of comdians we all know as Monty Python. He is the writer of many skits and intensely comedic songs that often have an existential twist. He is the writer of the insanely popular Broadway play Spamalot. It is that existential twist that runs through his comedy, especially in such work as Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, that is also present in this strange and somewhat clunky little novel. One might argue that there is something fundamentally existential about all comedy. In this book, Idle makes that very argument. We meet up, sometime hundreds of years from now, with a traveling comedy team, Lewis and Muscroft, a vaudevillian pair who tour the outer solar system's circuit of cruise liners, television shows, and night clubs. They travel with a robot named Carlton, whose appearance is modeled on David Bowie. On the sly, Carlton is studying Lewis and Muscroft (classic White Face and Red Nose entertainers, he says) and assembling a unified theory of comedy, attempting to find its place in a chaotic, indifferent, and ultimately absurd universe. This isn't a lot to hang a plot upon, so an adventure ensues. Lewis and Muscroft fall afoul of terrorist organizations engaged in an ambiguous plot. Silesian settlers on Mars are being displaced by the work to terraform that planet, as big chunks of icy comets are diverted from the asteroid belt to create a new sea and thicker atmosphere (not a terribly bad idea, actually). The refugees plot a revenge involving shipping arms on a cruise ship called the Lady Di. Somehow, our heroes are involved with various characters involved in the plot. They are tagged as having dangerous information that they don't even know they have. Eventually, after one space station is destroyed and the cruise ship bears down on the planet Mars, the plot becomes clear. This is the part of the story that is fairly clunky. The characters and their loyalties are pretty unclear to the reader throughout. Various events seem as distractions to the terrorist plot and to the plot of the book. All along the way, Carlton is sorting through his theory of comedy, with particular attention to comedians of the late twentieth century. Lewis finds his ex-wife and young daughter, Muscroft finds love. In the theory of comedy, though, Eric Idle reveals his expertise, his deep connection and his sense of what it is that comedy tells us about ourselves and our universe. These passages are the most moving in the book. The author finds a way to refer to himself, through Carlton's study of Monty Python, and to such comedians as Steve Martin, Dudley Moore, John Cleese and dozens of others. The result is surprisingly insightful, if somewhat absurd and definitely comedic. The secret of any joke is that everyone who gets it is acknowledging that there is more going on under the surface of things than is obvious. And that seems to be what is going on in the universe. It is elevated by laughing matter.