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Another deranged performance from Robert Rankin:
The Fandom of the Operator mixes surreal silliness, ghastly old jokes and a vein of apocalyptic bleakness, as in his previous novel
Web Site Story.
Young hero or anti-hero Gary Cheese grows up in a warped 1950s Brentford with two main interests: death, and the Lazlo Woodbine private-eye novels (see Waiting for Godalming) by PP Penrose. When this revered author dies, it's only logical that Gary and his bestest friend Dave should plan to crash the wake and reanimate him with voodoo. Black comedy follows, with highly uncomic results.
Years later, Gary at 22 has a dead-end telecomms job of stupefying tedium. He waits for a light to come on, and turns it off. That's all. This work is implausibly connected to the FLATLINE project--phone contact with the afterlife. The dead can reveal bizarre and terrible secrets, but meanwhile there's a lot Gary hasn't been telling us about his own history. Just how many people has he killed? Or was it actually him?
The mixture includes a barman who senses customers' True Names ("If it isn't the Honourable Valdec Firesword, Archduke of Alpha Centuri"),unlikely celebrity parties, car chases, copious and disgusting zombie sex, alien mind control, yet another secret base under Mornington Crescent tubestation, an ever-growing body count, and so many onion-layers of conspiracy and secret masters as to produce an effect of cosmic, transcendent pointlessness. Eat your heart out, Philip K Dick.
Robert Rankin is uniquely off-the-wall, unparalleled in his eccentricity: there's no other comic fantasy author like him. Thank heavens for that. --David Langford
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition
Relié
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From Publishers Weekly
Upon "the tragic early death" of British spoofmaster Rankin, his latest novel was dictated from the beyond to medium Lorretta Rune or so claims the book's back-flap author description. Longtime fans know better, of course: Rankin is a master of sophisticated (and sophomoric) practical jokes. His novels are cult classics in England and are attracting a growing following in the U.S. In this installment, Gary Charlton Cheese, abused child, serial killer, amateur necromancer, rabid fan of deceased writer P.P. "Charles" Penrose and bulb boy at the local telephone exchange, decides to "change things" in his boring life. Then he discovers, with the assistance of another employee, that the telephone exchange harbors a secret: FLATLINE, a phone line to the dead. "You dial in the full name of the deceased and the date of their departure. Then times the figure that comes up on the screen by the age of the person when they died and take away the year they were born and, wallah, you have your dialing code," explains a developmental services employee to Cheese. And voil , Cheese finds himself in communication with the dead. Subsequently, a whole new world opens up for the put-upon hero, whose wife, Sandra, has been shagging other guys, including his "bestest friend" in the whole world, Dave. Now he can talk to his dead dad or, say, Elvis but more importantly, he can dial up Penrose. The convoluted plot invariably leads to the question all fans must ask their favorite author "Where do you get your ideas from?" and the answer is revealed in the inimitable, roundabout Rankin way. Happily ridiculous and relentlessly funny, this is just the ticket for those who like dark British farce.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition
Relié
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