Bloodthirsty despots, fleabitten pirates, slick con-men and other knaves and tyrants make a memorable rogues gallery in this fetching miscellany of pseudo-biographical essays. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's 1935 satire Historia Universal de la Infamia, Welsh fantasist Hughes (Journeys Beyond Advice) profiles seven scoundrels whose unremarkable origins combine with unspeakable careers to give new meaning to the term "the banality of evil." Buccaneer François l'Olonnais was revered as a god by natives of the Yucatan because he feasted on the hearts of ritually sacrificed victims, while Dick Turpin, a legendary 18th-century highwayman, was an early example of the Peter Principle that incompetents are destined to rise to the top of their profession. In the cleverest of the accounts, "The Honest Liar, Denis Zachaire," an alchemist's conversion to debunker of others in his line of work represents his ultimate alchemical transmutation. Hughes relates his subjects' stories in a sober documentary style that contrasts sharply with their extravagant personalities and gives authenticity to the absurdities of their lives. At its best, this volume is a reminder that outrageous behavior is sometimes grist for comic fantasy with high entertainment value.
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One deliciously peculiar book deserves another. Like its namesake, Jorge Luis Borges' Historia universal de la infamia (1935), Hughes' homage consists of seven elaborated biographies, one short story, and eight fragments, all fakes, from other writers' works. So intent is Hughes on aping Borges that he even includes two prefaces corresponding to those in the edition of Historia he owns. He deviates from schematic imitation only by including, in a pendant he urges Borges adulators to ignore, three stories that parody, respectively, Borges, British sf author John Sladek, and this book's reader parodying Hughes. OK, Hughes' statement of the last story's intent is tongue-in-cheek; nevertheless, it typifies the Borgesian wit, ever delighted to boggle the mind, that suffuses the book, rousing the same complex of amusement, horror, and awe that Historia evokes. Just as the biographies pique curiosity to know what in them is historically real, the stories play with the consistency of their own narrative realities, and the fragments concern changes in the states of aspects of reality. Everything here dazzles. Ray Olson
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