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Overview
Five years have passed since a mysterious millennial downpour spread infertility throughout the land. As the Fertility Crisis deepens, veterinarian Bobby Sullivan has other things on his mind - he's on the run after following a husband's orders to exterminate a monkey named Giselle, his wife's cherished baby-substitute. Sullivan finally stops running and opens his veterinary office in a small coastal town, only to learn he has not really escaped - the town is haunted by the Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, whose life is directly linked to the evolution of events confounding Sullivan in the modern world. As a century and a half of logic, religion, magic and science connect, two men, three women and Queen Victoria's entire bestiary are catapulted into a wild and explosively funny farce.Editorials
New York Newsday
A madcap black comedy that suggests Will Self's work...required reading for anyone who dreams of the perfect child.Kirkus Reviews
A grab bag of a story that offers a literate if self-conscious and scattered tour of Victorian grotesqueries as postmillennial Britain faces extinction. Second-novelist Jensen (Egg Dancing, not reviewed) moves from the coming millennium back to the Victorian period, and forward again, in an attempt to illuminate the many strange links between humans and their nearest primate kin. A torrential rain has caused a mysterious decline in fertility, and by 2005 it's clear that Britons will likely become extinct. Primates have become substitute infants, and when veterinarian Bobby Sullivan is accused of having murdered one (he insists that he was only following the orders of the jealous husband), the threat of prosecution sends him north to the remote seaside town of Thunder Spit, where all Jensen's narrative threads eventually converge. The author's version of the Victorian age here is populated with a crowd of odd or outright freakish individuals. The famous taxidermist Dr. Scrapie, of Thunder Spit, has been asked to mount an elaborate collection of stuffed animals for Queen Victoria. His wife, the "Empress of Laudanum," has drug-induced visions of the future, and their giantess daughter, Violet, is a noted vegetarian cook. There's also a former slave-trader searching for animal specimens for the Queen and hoping, meanwhile, to figure out whether apes and humans can mateþand who finds the last "Gentleman Monkey" in the wild and puts him in a cage with a captive ballerina. Meanwhile, the harried Bobby is attracted to Rose and Blanche, twins with unusual feet and body hair. Pregnant by Bobby, the two women, who turn out (of course) to be descendants of the gentleman monkey and theballerina, via Violet, are the result of an "evolutionary tangent"þthe sudden changes that speed up evolution and produce a new breed of humans. They are also, it seems, the mothers of a new race of Brits. Strained would-be satire, with its intellectual and narrative punch diluted by very obvious foreshadowing.Book Details
Published
June 1, 1998
Publisher
Overlook Press
Pages
288
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780879518332