I’m a fan of Thorne Smith’s fantasy work but never got around to reading his TURNABOUT until recently. While it’s funny, it’s not up to his best work. It is, however, better than the film adaptation (the source of the cover below).
Smith’s work typically portrayed a bourgeoisie protagonist smothering under his own respectability until magic drags him out of his comfort zone; Topper is the archetype and the Cary Grant film captures the spirit of Smith’s books perfectly. This book is a little different in that the protagonists, Tom and Sally, aren’t as successful. They’re a suburban couple who hover on the brink of becoming a great marriage but can’t quite make it (occasional adulteries aren’t helping). A small Egyptian idol sitting on their shelves turns out to house a minor deity who decides to help them out by transferring them to other bodies.
The results are less a satire of gender (though Sally knows exactly what she’s doing when as Tom, she publicly flirts with one of her lovers) than of the suburbs, from the freeflowing bootleg gin and casual straying to the discomfort at how the couple defy polite convention (Sally’s taken up smoking a pipe). It’s fun, and there’s a great essay by Smith at the end of this edition where he explains that as his books are absurd, trivial and meaningless, they’re just like life, ergo realistic!
Adam Sisman’s THE SECRET LIFE OF JOHN LE CARRE´ shows David Cornwell — the man behind the Le Carré pseudonym was a constant womanizer who cheated serially on his two wives, some of his mistresses, had a menage a trois with a married couple (Sisman speculates he may have hooked up with more men than that) and dropped friends and lovers who got too close, too clingy or too critical of his work. As a Le Carré fan it was interesting to learn how much of his work was based on truth (The Naive and Sentimental Lover was a roman a clef based on the threeway) though it appears in showing many of his protagonists with faithless lives Cornwell inverted reality. Sisman was a Le Carré biographer who had to leave a lot out to get his subject’s cooperation but now that Cornwell is dead …
SHRILL DUSK: City of Magic Book One by Helen Harper has a Manchester gambler discover weird events and strange individuals popping up are a prelude to an apocalyptic rain of magic turning Manchester into a supernatural city where the impossible is easy, her BFF is now a bunyip and she’s suddenly possessed of magical blasting powers. This mercifully avoids the Magic Newbie Gets Heavy Exposition problem though if anything everyone accepts the impossible much too easily. That may reflect this is a spinoff from an established series where we get the explanation why this apocalypse happened (and why one supporting character has the Obviously Significant name Madrona Hatter). Enjoyable overall, though I’m in no rush to get Book Two.
DISCOVERING SCARFOLK by Richard Littler is the bizarre account of a man in the 1970s UK who made the mistake of stopping on his cross-country trip in Scarfolk where everything is illegal (“Whatever you’re going to do, don’t.”), his kids disappear, a monstrous horned beast named Mr. Johnson may be lurking everywhere, the town council hides a sinister monolith and the local magazines offer recipes for things like steak and kid pie. A spinoff from a podcast and partly inspired by books and pamphlets of the 1970s (reworked here into things like The Bumper Book of Disability Jokes), this is bizarre and entertaining.
