Cosmic comedy
The joker's guide to the galaxy. In Eric Idle's world the life force is laughter, the atmosphere ironic. A solar system with meteor showers of gags and one-liners, where planets are comic props, revolving around a central pun.
Having pondered the meaning of life as a founding member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Idle, in his second novel (after Hello Sailor, not counting his children's fiction), turns his attention and wit to the meaning of comedy and its place in the universe.
The front-cover description, 'a post-modem novel', gives an inkling, if any were needed, of what awaits - a robot that looks like a man and wants to learn to laugh, an intergalactic trail of intrigue leading a pair of comedians to the home of showbiz, Mars, and a plot by terrorist nasties with no discernible sense of humour.
In the best traditions of Red Dwarf and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, but in Idle's style, he undertakes an imaginative and engaging flight of fancy.
As Carlton the android struggles with irony and the secret of comedy, his human masters, stand-up comedians Alex and Lewis - the 'red nose' and the 'white face' - race through space to discover who is sabotaging their career and why; on the way accidentally uncovering a plot to destroy Mars.
Idle jokes at the expense of himself and Python, and rants wonderfully at targets from lust for fame, to commercialism, to 'new man' sensitivity.
The irreverence might not be as offensive as (for its time) some of his old Python material, but still, puns about pro-life choice, poking fun at the 'Gay Guys Galleria' singing chorale, and naming a solar cruise ship the Princess Di, for example, might raise the odd politically correct eyebrow. Idle's main characters are well drawn, and suspense is achieved amid all the levity.
Continuity is generally an inconvenience (22nd-century humans seem to have evolved little from today's, except when it accommodates the plot), but this and the holes in a thinnish plot are excusable given a general suspension of reality and redeemed by a fiendishly clever pay-off.
The pace, once you are into the spirit of things, is unflagging, with short chapters, sped up by extensive dialogue: in all, this is a funny, clever, readable novel.
The Road to Mars by Eric Idle Boxtree $170
