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David Wilson

The Trouble  With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of  Thomas Paine

by Paul Collins

Bloomsbury, $188

The next time you hear a star snivel about media bitchiness, just laugh. Today's public figures have it easy, judging by the vitriol directed at  US founding father Thomas Paine during his day.

Detractors called him a wife-beater, cheapskate, smelly skunk, infidel and, in the words of one period biographer, 'a compound of all that  is most base, disgusting, and wicked'. One critic even went so far as to accuse Paine of raping a cat.

When the libertarian died in 1809, aged 72, on the site of what is now  a Manhattan gay bar, the Quaker church refused his request to be buried in their cemetery. He wound up underneath his upstate New York farm, his gravestone a target for rock-throwing Christians.

The flak came his way because he challenged the might of the church. One bible thumper and critic,  English writer William Cobbett  eventually came round to the wisdom of the author of Common Sense, dug up his bones and took them to Britain.

Cobbett's dream was to build a mausoleum worthy of the iconoclast who  stood up to George III and survived a quarrel with Maximilien Robespierre.   However, the tomb  was never built.

In a reflection of Paine's restless spirit, his remains were scattered.  His brainstem  found its way into a brass bust of him in New York. A box of his bones  ended up in London. A lock  of his hair fetched up in Edinburgh. And his skull supposedly headed down under, resting in Sydney.

Paul Collins  tenaciously follows the trail on a mission whose eccentricity mirrors the spirit of his earlier  books such as Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism and Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World.

Often described as inventive, Collins has a lovely, light touch. Consider how he describes Paine biographer and dubious abolitionist Parson Conway:

'No, he was not a hateful man. He was a racist, and that was not the same thing. He believed in race: he believed it marked a natural border. On one side of that border were humans ... And on the other side were ... not quite humans.'

Never quite serious, Collins spices his text with all kinds of curious insights, even pausing to advise on how to be left alone on the subway. The trick, it transpires, is to read 'a really beat-up old book'.

If you pet and mutter to a ragged Bible bound with rubber bands you may well find yourself travelling  first-class with an entire carriage to yourself. But any old battered book will serve to give you some space.

Collins supplies a profusion of period subplots coloured by intrigue. Consider the Octagonians: vegetarian idealists with a fondness for dividing things up into eight, who settled in Kansas. Deluded by a charismatic called Orson Fowler who was  devoted to changing the world,  they expected a fairyland of natural beauty. 'What they got was mud  and desolation,' Collins writes, revealing that the idealists were  badly organised.

So disorganised that, after the ravages of malaria and Indian raids,  they lacked even the wood to build coffins for their dead children. Faecal matter seeped from the cesspool of the Fowler family home.  'The tenants of his octagonal palace - the healthiest building in America - died in fevered agony, killed off in a horrific plague of typhoid,' Collins writes.

Collins' digressions are always engrossing. However, they can cause the reader to lose the thread of the narrative or even forget what the book is about. A dramatis personae and  a chart of his journeys would have been welcome.

Despite weighing in at less  than 300 pages, Collins' portrait  of an amazing maverick may tax  your concentration.



The Trouble  With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of  Thomas Paine