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3.0�toiles sur 5 Lost in the jungle, Jui 23 2009

Par	ES (Ottawa, ON) - Voir tous mes commentaires

This review is from: Pandora In The Congo (Paperback)

To sum up an extremely complex plot very briefly: A teenage pulp-fiction writer in 1914 London stumbles on a real-life pulp story: a gypsy named Marcus Garvey (who has nothing to do with the Pan-Africanist historical figure) claims to have discovered a Lost World in the Congo, and needs to have the news made into a book that will capture the public's imagination. This, his lawyer believes, might just help him escape the scaffold for murdering his two bullet-headed English masters in the jungle.

What follows is a stirring and vivid tale of underground cities, a tribe or race of people perhaps not of this planet, battles and narrow escapes, and an inter-racial or possibly even inter-species love affair. Eventually, in a genre switch, there are courtroom dramatics, plus an appearance by Roger Casement (this time it actually is the historical figure, more or less). And we get to follow the pulp-fiction writer's own adventures, so there's also some WWI drama.

Albert Pi�ol doesn't so much recreate as channel H Rider Haggard's She and Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, with a dash of The Mole People. The result is utterly strange, especially for being told without a trace of irony: or almost.

Pi�ol, who writes in Catalan and is trained as an anthropologist, seems never to have been to London or to have bothered with more than the most superficial historical research; which just adds to the fantastic atmosphere, of an early twentieth-century England as bizarre and fecund as his Central African jungle.

As does the workmanlike translation. If it makes Pi�ol's prose sound less 'literary' than the original may have been, it certainly has that Boys' Own Adventure feel (although I don't think Conan Doyle would have confused 'that' and 'who').

The same can also be said, with obvious allowances, for the love affair, consummated with a day of (discreetly limned) sex - and the author is at pains to point out that the time span is to be taken literally. Marathon Latin lovemaking sessions (so that's why they need a siesta!) seem to be a hallmark of modern Spanish literature. But here, once you've accepted that the object of desire has ears like a bat and the ability to climb through holes no larger than her head, even the fact that the tryst takes place in a treetop doesn't entirely strain credulity; though you do begin to wonder when the story is going to get moving again.

The post-modern meta-novel part, though - in which the Professor-Challenger part is relativized - is a problem. Pi�ol is fundamentally suited to writing Professor Challenger stories, down to the weakness for broad humour and broader stereotypes. His attempts at post-colonial lesson-drawing, however, are banal. In any case, a story like Pandora in the Congo only works through suspension of belief; when you try to make a fantastic story fit into a realistic, not to mention 'meaningful', explanation, the fun tends to drain out of it.

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