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~ Simon's House of Lipstick ~ • ~ The Great Walt of China ~ •
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Jonathan Carroll specializes in ambiguity. One look at titles like Kissing the Beehive, The Marriage of Sticks and The Wooden Sea should tell readers that they'll be embarking on journeys to strange and dreamlike worlds where our definitions of reality don't apply.Carroll's latest novel is a sequel to 2002's White Apples. Unlike most sequels, Glass Soup is wonderful in isolation - though reading White Apples first will make it even more enjoyable.In White Apples, Chaos became personified and set out to control the world. The only thing that stands in his way is Anjo, the unborn child of Vincent Ettrich and Isabelle Neukor. But for Anjo to be effective, he must be raised by both parents. After Vincent's death, Isabelle learns how to follow his spirit and bring him back. In Glass Soup, Chaos, through his diabolical agents, tries to lure Isabelle back to the land of the dead. If the agents are successful, Isabelle won't be able to return; her baby will be born there; and Anjo will have no effect on the living world. Chaos will reign supreme.The tale takes place in the author's expatriate city of Vienna, and his loving descriptions make the setting nearly as much a character as Isabelle and Vincent. Readers who have never been there will picture themselves having morning coffee at outdoor cafes in the mammoth shadows of the flakturme (German anti-aircraft towers so massive they can't be torn down).There's no living writer quite like Carroll. Think of what Franz Kafka might have been like if he'd been an optimist. But Carroll's ability to make a surreal world seem ordinary and to show that love can transcend death is unmatched. And Glass Soup is as good as he gets. Grade: A Mark Graham In Carroll’s lavishly appointed world of fever dream and fable, each night as you sleep your dreams (and nightmares) stack up, one by one over a lifetime, and are used piece by piece to create the architecture of a tailor-made afterlife (for good and for ill). Once in your personally outfitted post-life repose, you discover there’s nothing to worry about, because God turns out to be a polar bear named Bob. (Not all is warm and fuzzy, though; there are plenty of souls jamming up on a literal road to hell.) As always with Carroll’s fiction, there are wondrous, menacing, fantastic tendrils connecting the plausible with the surreal and the living with the dead lurking just around the corner from everyday experience. Glass Soup is a wonder-story rich and complete in its own right, but fans will be interested to know that it also serves as a sequel to the tale of Vincent Ettrich and his beloved Isabelle Neukor, continuing the modern-day Orpheus tale begun in White Apples. Carroll’s flights of imagination seem boundless, but, amazingly, his ambitious themes and hallucinatory landscape don’t get the better of this tightly plotted, beautifully written story. This may be his best work yet. Prolific and imaginative, Carroll writes delectable novels that combine riddle-like metaphysics with Magritte-like surrealism and romantic fantasy. In his latest cosmic Vienna-based tale, he echoes Hermann Hesse and Steven Millhauser as he picks up the story of the passionate lovers Vincent and Isabelle, who starred in White Apples (2002). In spite of this connection, readers new to Carroll's magic need not hesitate. They won't be anywhere near as confused as Simon, a blatant womanizer who finds himself confronting an octopus driving a bus, a tiny yet dapper and bossy fellow named Broximon, and God in the form of a polar bear. Elsewhere, a shape-shifting villain has evil designs on Isabelle's two closest friends, and Chaos, a malevolent force, grows ever more destructive. Pregnant with a child crucial to the battle between order and chaos, Isabelle must stay safe, yet there seems to be little Vincent can do to protect her. Carroll's clever and spellbinding tale offers fans and newcomers alike startling perspectives on time and reality, an afterlife made of dreams, a glimmering vision of the divine, and a sweet tribute to love. Let me give you just one example of how brilliantly he plays with things like a set of interfitting Chinese boxes. When poor Character A becomes convinced that the total bizareness of his weird afterlife must surely indicate the whole thing's a mere preliminary to his being tossed into Hell with its lakes of bubbling brimstone, he decides to visit God's office, which he's noticed many times before but avoided going to because of sheer terror. He is deeply puzzled when he sees God is an enormous polar bear. But then love flows over him when he realizes it is Bob, the stuffed polar bear he adored as a child. Finally though, his heart sinks when it seems Bob wants him to do something more terrifiying than diving into pools of bubbling brimstone. With almost any other author I would be careful not to give away such a scene but GLASS SOUP is so full of such flights, so packed with them, there's no problem at all. I could go on and on with such gems and still not scratch the surface. Also be warned: If you read fantasy to get away from the grim and painful emotional realities of life I would particularly recommend you skip Carroll's work.On the other hand if you're hurting and would like some very good teachings on the management and treatment of such hurts, I would very much recommend you read Carroll's work.There's really nobody like him.Once again you have the great good fortune to be able to read a new book by Jonathan Carroll and that's a lucky break, indeed, because Carroll is one of the best living writers of grownup fantasy.GLASS SOUP is a sequel to WHITE APPLES but though it would be a good idea to read the one before the other because of the accumulation of riches, Carroll has sculpted this new book in such a way that it stands easily on its own. In this sequel to the acclaimed White Apples, the realms of the living and the dead overlap. Aided by his pregnant mistress, Isabelle, Vincent has returned to the land of the living, leaving the dead to their separate universes populated only by their dreams, where nothing is ever forgotten. He, Isabelle, and assorted friends and acquaintances-some real, some not-collude to thwart the agents of Chaos. The agents seek to lure Isabelle back to the land of the dead, to reside forever with her unborn baby in a place where lines blur between past and present, reality and fantasy: an octopus drives a tour bus; "a little man the size of a candy bar" is a dead man's constant companion; and God is a polar bear named Bob. Carroll's tale alternates between lighthearted and menacing as it races headlong to its bittersweet and utterly unpredictable conclusion. A delightfully inventive novel that never loses the reader's interest, this is enthusiastically recommended.
-David Keymer, Modesto, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. An ambitious retelling of the cosmic struggle between good and evil, with a little Judeo-Christian mythology and a smattering of popular culture mythos thrown in, make Carroll's latest a delicious dish - one that's lighter and better plotted than his White Apples (2002). A group of 30-something Americans living in Vienna (where Carroll himself resides) find themselves caught in the middle of a battle between God (a giant polar bear named Bob,
Vienna resident Carroll's sequel to his fantasy about the afterlife, White Apples (2002). Vain, down-at-heel tour guide Simon Haden drifts cipher-like through life. Despite his good looks, women no longer swoon at his feet; an octopus drives his tour bus; and God is a giant stuffed polar bear named Bob. Finally, thanks to the promptings of 12-inch-high Broximon, Simon grasps one salient fact: He's dead; his world is woven out of the dreams-and sometimes nightmares-he had in life. But the one woman he loved and could never have, Isabelle Neukor, keeps showing up in Simon's death. Problem is, Isabelle's alive, and pregnant with Anjo, a child whose advent will determine the fate of the world. How? Well, Chaos has somehow acquired intelligence and the desire to rule. But Chaos needs the mysterious "mosaic" to remain unchanged, lest Chaos's smarts vanish. Isabelle's lover, Vincent Ettrich, died and was brought back to life in the previous outing; now he remembers pieces of what he learned while dead, among them how to control time. Vincent may be the key to stopping John Flannery, Chaos's sinister and powerful agent, who loves women and murders them when he no longer finds the relationship convenient-women who include several of Isabelle's best friends. To escape Flannery and his devilish tricks, Isabelle wishes herself voluntarily into death. She still lives, but now she's trapped there, able to perceive the living world but no longer able to return to or influence it. Dazzling details and more twists than a bag of pretzels: disquieting, often absorbing, but, for skeptical readers, more questions than answers.
But back to God. A polar bear, then. Sure. Because, you see, that’s okay… in a Glass Soup world in which an octopus can drive a bus full of cartoon characters (in the beautifully titled Prologue, ‘Simon’s House of Lipstick’); and in which a (comparatively) mundane activity such as the inappropriate disposal of a pizza box can set ‘two mates… laughing like loons at the total Dada awesomeness of what they had just done’. (If I might make a prediction, I would guess that the phrase ‘Dada awesomeness’ will be used to illustrate at least one Carroll interview in the future. And while I might sigh at that journalist’s laziness, I wouldn’t blame anyone for the shorthand: it really does sum up Carroll very well.) But the central theme of Glass Soup is death. There can’t be many people who have no clue whatever about the work of Jonathan Carroll; but just in case, here might be what the author puts on his writing resume. The language is always, here included, beautiful. Flip it open at random – in fact flip the oeuvre open at random – and you’ll find a stunning phrase, Quite often an alternative world is revealed very slowly, but in Glass Soup the weirdness sidles right up and says howdy. You have characters pondering their places in the world via sudden shocks, and here – in the bracket of Carroll’s best work which would also include The Land of Laughs and From the Teeth of Angels – you burgle your way through a character’s worst ruminations on death. When I was twelve, an alcoholic teacher named Tite (by name and by nature, as the joke at the time ran) invited the class – a class of Religious Education – to draw God. To sketch our impressions of God… Partly because I didn’t know how to draw much else, I drew God as a businessman, in a blue suit and a tidy, ‘80s beard; but I wish I’d had Jonathan Carroll’s notion of God, as revealed in Glass Soup. Why not? God’s a polar bear. Sure. If there has been a doctoral thesis or even a magazine article, or (and this would be fitting) a painting entitled ‘The Dog in the works of Jonathan Carroll’, your reviewer hasn’t seen it; but it would seem, twenty-odd years down the line, and with Glass Soup being Carroll’s fifteenth major publishing project, to be a ripe subject. Dogs feature heavily in Carroll-Land. Dogs can speak. Characters are even referred to as dogs. (‘Brox was the size of a small dog now’ – Glass Soup.) But another major theme of the author’s work, particularly in the second half of his career, is the linguistic reversal of D-O-G. Carroll has God on his mind, and he wants us to know it. In the author’s ‘Uh-Oh City’, for example, a character learns that he is in fact one-thirty-second part of God, and (if you don’t know already) it’s as easy to buy into what Carroll has to offer as it is to buy groceries. The man’s a genius. You might not like what he has to say (Carroll’s previous novel, White Apples, was a major disappointment for me; and I was at first underwhelmed to learn that that novel’s protagonists would be back for Glass Soup – a wholly unfounded reservation, as it turned out); and he might make you angry, laugh or cry. But there is little chance that you simply won’t believe him. God is a bear, a belly button is a death-line, and death is like school. And while it is bad form for a reviewer to refer too much to himself, it is pointless to pretend that novels are read in an emotional vacuum. It just so happens that death and its aftermath is much on your reviewer’s mind right now; as a consequence, perhaps, I found this novel less amusing than some of Carroll’s other outings and tear-shakingly moving. It is a remarkable return to form, and I would urge you to get your hands on a copy. Read it on the bus and look up, blinking in surprise, to see that your driver is a still a human being. Read it on your honeymoon. Read it in court. Read it in the bath. But read it. Now I’m off to copyright ‘Dada Awesomeness’ for future use.
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