The
Land of Laughs is the first novel by the idiosyncratic, unclassifiable writer
Jonathan Carroll. I'd call what he does Magical Realism. It's closer to Angela
Carter and Italo Calvino and Isabel Allende than it is most fantasy fiction.
The Land of Laughs is a novel all about those moments when characters tip over
the brink from the humdrum into the plainly impossible and we as readers are
forced to go with them. It's fair to say that Carroll is dramatising this very
phenomenon of teetering on the cusp; this business of walking into magic and
magic meeting you halfway. In his world, though, it isn't really about magic at
all - it's about the products of the imagination and the fierceness and skill
of the individuals who can bring their creations to life, for good or ill. The
Land of Laughs is always ruled by the person who can invent most vividly.
It's
a book about fans. Thomas Abbey is a lifelong fan of Marshall France, and has
spent much of his life collecting up rare editions of this writer's most
exquisite works. The book opens with a good-natured tussle in a rare bookstore
between Thomas and another fan, over ownership of a particularly desirable
volume. A bargain is stuck - our hero gets to visit and photocopy the book -
and a bond is forged as the bibliophiles become lovers. And the reader gets a
powerful sense of the weird fascination Marshall France's books exert over
their devoted owners. France is a deceased one-time reclusive - we gain an
impression of a melange of Sendak, Salinger, Gorey and Dr Seuss. A cult author,
living in a remote small town, distantly removed from his rabid admirers and
collectors.
The
action of the novel follows Thomas's attempt to research and write a life of
France. To this end he journeys with his new girlfriend into the heartland of
America and they find themselves warmly welcomed by the inhabitants of Galen -
the apparently ordinary town where Marshall France and his daughter made their
home. The daughter, Anna now lives alone - she's aloof, mysterious and straight
away attractive to our hero. Throughout the rest of the book he'll drift away
from poor, dull Saxony towards the magnetic pull of the author's spooky
daughter. She, meanwhile, becomes convinced that Thomas is just the man for the
job of writing about her father. Though initially resistant to such a proposal,
she comes fervently to hope that the biography Thomas starts to write will
bring Marshall France back to life.
It's
at this point - just when Thomas Abbey thinks he's starting to live the
writerly dream in a homely utopia - that everything goes completely bonkers. He
overhears dogs chatting surreptitiously. He catches glimpses of impossible
stuff out of the corner of his eye. It seems, all of a sudden, altogether likely
that the characters from France's books are alive and well and haunting the
vicinity. And also, that there’s a plot afoot. This town and its inhabitants
seem to be living out a predetermined destiny that has started to go awry…
It's
a delicious, shivery exercise in cranking up tension, as Carroll toys with the
whimsical aspects of his invented writer's oeuvre - and then turns them
thoroughly sinister. It's like the creepiest aspects of every classic
children's book are being shown at their darkest and most disturbing. For
Thomas there's no escape from the daughter, the autobiography - or even the
town.
I
read this book first over twenty years ago and I've read it probably eight
times in all. The most recent time was last summer, when I was teaching on a
residential course for Children's Writers near Loch Ness. It was wonderful to
think about children's books and in my spare time vanish into Jonathan
Carroll's world again. I knew the book, I discovered, just about by heart.
One
of the oddest, most memorable events of that week was when our guest reader -
Julia Donaldson - gave a talk late at night in the sitting room of that
farmhouse in the middle of the moors. She got all of the students up on their
feet and dressing up as characters from her most famous picture book, The
Gruffalo. Everyone was wearing animal ears, noses and tails. The text of the
whole book was read aloud - dramatically, excitedly - and everyone took their
parts with great gusto. A fair amount of wine had been drunk, as it often is at
these affairs and the atmosphere was great, and rather heady and strange. For a
few moments at least it was as if that children's author's most celebrated book
was coming to life before our eyes - and that August night real life was chiming
beautifully with the book I happened to be rereading yet again that week: the
book I most wish I had written myself.
(illustration is by Charles Vess.)
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