From Publishers Weekly
A freelance designer's effort to collect a work debt turns into an unusual series of international adventures in Fischer's latest, a meandering, deadpan anti-epic with a fascinating female protagonist. Oceane is a former sex show performer turned designer, a brilliant, beautiful but reclusive woman who interacts with the world via an array of high-tech toys from her modern London apartment. As the novel begins, her comfortable existence is disturbed by a client who stiffs her on a bill and a letter from an old boyfriend named Walter who supposedly died a decade ago. To assist her in her quest to be paid and to find Walter, Oceane turns to Audley, the cheerfully sinister head of the Dun Waitin Debt Collection Agency. Audley, energetic and eager for unusual assignments, becomes Oceane's eyes and ears, toting devices that allow her to travel vicariously through him. As they set up this system, Oceane recalls life on the job at a sex club in Barcelona where she first met Walter, and Audley describes his failed attempt to sell his services as a mercenary in Zagreb. Finally, Audley travels to Micronesia to track down a missing letter from Walter. Fischer's episodic plotting will frustrate some readers, but his talents as a raconteur and a cynical observer of the absurd are considerable. Oceane's stoic eccentricity and her flair for the dramatic make her a worthy match for the fascinating cast of mostly male supporting characters, and her final realization-"the battle is always with yourself, but that doesn't preclude having an ally"-is curiously moving.
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From Booklist
Fischer has balls; there's no other way to say it. Not only did he rip Martin Amis'
Yellow Dog in the
Daily Telegraph, he fired away just as his own thoroughly weird new novel was published in England. There's nothing like a little Maileresque growling to fuel literary controversy, so expect the U.S. publication of Fischer's novel to prompt more sniping. The book has a premise to die for: computer designer Oceane never leaves her room in London, preferring to experience the world via the Internet and by inviting tourists over to re-create daily life in her apartment. Then she receives a cable from a dead man and is thrown back into her old world as a sex-show performer in Barcelona. Still she doesn't leave home, thanks to the intrepid work of one Audley of the Dun Waitin Debt Collection Agency. Fischer uses the premise as an excuse to unleash a torrent of often outrageously funny social observations and grumblings about modern life. Unlike his first novel, the superb
Under the Frog (1995), in which his raucous wit was used in service of a story, this time he pretty much shoots from the hip. It's a tour de force of a kind, to be sure, and it will be embraced by those of similar mind; others with a fondness for traditional narrative, however, may feel like Fischer felt about Amis: "It's like your favorite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
