In Search of the Great Australian Novel

What was the funniest novel of the 20th century? Saint Christopher Hitchens recently pondered that inquiry in the course of awarding the palm to Lucky Jim. I desire to inquire a more than modest question. What is the funniest novel of the 21st century -- this brand-new, post-9/11 century that already demoes so many promising marks of being even more than fouled-up than the last? To anybody who have read A Dancing Bear, that huge and raucous narrative of love, post-modernity, series homicide and terrorism, the reply won't be in any doubt. Unfortunately almost cipher has read it. To day of the month the book have only been published online. Its author, who variously names himself Mark Osher, Saint David Free and Kirk Kinbote, and who -- if you believe his website -- may not even still be alive, is rumored to have got pulled out of at least two publication trades at the eleventh hour, after the houses involved sought to do unacceptable cuts to his text. In effect the book is small known of outside its author's indigen Australia, and even within Commonwealth Of Commonwealth Of Australia it have reached only a bantam circle of readers.

What, then, is the novel about? It open ups on an nameless university campus, where the supporter -- an good-humored adequate immature cypher named Fenton Bland -- have just joined a society of pupil Maoists in order to acquire near the miss he loves. These Maoists will turn out a troublesome bunch. In an attempt to show that communism is not yet dead, they perpetrate, or at least attempt to perpetrate, an increasingly rococo series of terrorist outrages. Bland, who is at bosom a law-abiding brother with no reliable taste sensation for extremist political relation ("Like fellation and death," we are told, "Maoism had always struck him as one of those things that happened to other people") happens himself in an increasingly pressing quandary: he must either travel on pretending to be a terrorist, running the hazard that one of the Maoists' bizarre secret plans might one twenty-four hours succeed, or he must forever moving ridge adieu to his slender trusts of making the miss his.

That is the book's spinal anesthesia storyline, its cardinal moral MacGuffin. Further secret plans and fictional characters cavort on the book's periphery. There is Pamela Scratch, a former childhood familiarity of Bland's who have now morphed into an incredibly ardent pupil activist. Her current undertaking is to buttonhole for the unconditional release from detention of a patently guilty thrill-killer named Neville Aggot ("Campaigning for the release of a multiple liquidator ... even Bakunin would look at that and say, 'Jesus that's left-wing!'"). Bland intensely dislikes her but is nonetheless condemned to travel on having java with her on a bi-monthly basis in perpetuity, because he believes, although his memory is rickety on the point, that he might well have got touched her, when they were playing in a sandpit at the age of five, on the pudendum.

Then there is the distinguished post-structural theoretician Ivan Lego, who, in keeping with his thesis that "every address enactment is an enactment of linguistic genocide," bring forths a book consisting wholly of blank pages. The work goes a bestseller. Osher/Free/Kinbote reproduces a four-page "extract" of Lego's book by leaving four pages of his novel blank. This is but one case of what is, at least for this reader, one of the novel's cardinal mysteries. Are it an onslaught on post-modernism, Oregon an exercising in it? Or is it both things at once?

Meanwhile the Maoists' panic political campaign is hotting up. Assorted sorts of atrociousness are contemplated. A junior Maoist suggests the usage of a auto bomb. "I'm listening," answers the head Maoist, "provided you're not referring to my Kombi." Death listings are drawn up. The Maoists resoluteness to aim the increasingly celebrated -- and increasingly asinine -- Ivan Lego. The option of running him over with a minibike ridden by a suicide bomber is canvassed, but scrapped as a logistical nightmare. ("Why trouble oneself with a bomb at all, if you're already going to be creaming the geezer with a minibike at top speed? You can't kill the cat twice. And what if the bomb doesn't travel off at exactly the right instant? What make we make then? Dismount from the wreckage and just screen of run after him till the thing explodes?")

It soon clicks on the reader that all the book's secret plans are coming marvelously together. Neville Claude Aggot escapes, and efforts (with merciful deficiency of success) to travel on a violent disorder of "non-consensual sex and death." The Maoists decide, for grounds too complicated to travel into here, to slay Lego in the style of a series slayer and pin the law-breaking on the still-at-large Aggot. The scene in which Bland and the head Maoist, packing a meat meat cleaver and a tomahawk respectively, effort -- with wildly differing degrees of enthusiasm -- to come in the theorist's place in the dead of nighttime is a tour de force of amusing writing.

As indeed is the whole book. This novel, believe me, is not destined to stay indeterminate for long. It is only a substance of time before everyone will be talking about it. Check it out while it's calm a curio, a cult item, a concealed pearl in the great weedy dripping draw of the Internet.