Madness Is Better Than Defeat

Starred review from November 13, 2017
In this rowdy, thoroughly satisfying literary adventure, Beauman (Glow) takes readers deep into the jungle of Honduras. An eclectic Hollywood film crew sets out to film on location at a mysterious Mayan temple, but they arrive to find that another group of Americans got there the day before and is disassembling the temple in order to take it back as a trophy for their wealthy benefactor. There is a standoff between the two groups: the days turn into weeks and the weeks into years. After 18 years, the two factions have turned into minisocieties acting out a sort of proxy war on behalf of their two backers. The extensive cast includes a relentless newspaper gossip columnist on one side and a burgeoning ethnologist on the other. Somehow, the film crew uses the silver they find to manufacture film stock from scratch and produce millions of feet of footage that ultimately end up in a secret government archive. Yet, the mystery that eludes both camps—and the reason secret agents are circling the situation—is what’s inside the temple itself. Exquisitely comic and absurd, Beauman’s imaginative novel brims with the snappy dialogue, vivid scenery, and converging story lines of an old Hollywood classic; it also says something essential about the nature of film and memory. Agent: David Forrer, Inkwell Management.

December 1, 2017
Filmmakers, industrialists, and CIA agents converge in Honduras in this madcap intellectual thriller.The plot of the fourth novel by Beauman (Glow, 2015, etc.) is as overgrown as its setting, but it mainly concerns Jervis, a filmmaker determined to shoot a movie at an ancient temple in the Honduran jungle in 1938; Elias, who's been charged by his conglomerate-owning father to disassemble said temple and ship it back to America; and the standoff that ensues when representatives of both sides show up. A nearly 20-year standoff, that is, during which time the few dozen arrivals receive no input from the outside world; the predicament gives the filmmakers enough time to figure out how to make home-brew celluloid film despite being way off their shooting schedule, and because everybody misses all of World War II, nobody blinks when a shelter-seeking ex-Nazi soldier arrives proclaiming the victory of the "German-American alliance." Adding another layer of strangeness is the novel's main narrator, Zonulet, a former journalist-turned-CIA agent writing a history of inter-agency skulduggery involving the support of the fruit industry, the libertine religious philosophy of the natives, and a hallucinatory fungus discovered onsite. That's not counting the drama involving two of Zonulet's former work colleagues, various romances, and surprise revelations about Jervis' and Elias' pasts. What to make of all this? The title of the ill-fated film (Hearts in Darkness) suggests an allegorical update on Conrad, but introspection and displacement aren't big themes here; Jervis proffers a theory about effective, simple storytelling, but Beauman seems almost comically determined to flout it, lacquering scenes in ornate, often wearying detail.The overall effect is of a Paul Theroux novel on a bender: quirky, exotic, but stubbornly tangled.

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January 1, 2018

In a Virginia warehouse in 1959, Zonulet, a journalist-turned-CIA agent, pores through a massive archive of documents, searching for evidence that will clear his name. In so doing, he provides a long and twisty account of his attempt to locate two groups of Americans who traveled to Spanish Honduras in 1938 and vanished without a trace. One group, financed by a New York industrialist, was sent to find a sacred Mayan temple, deconstruct it, and bring it back to the United States. The other was a film crew from Los Angeles sent to find the same temple and use it as a backdrop for a Hollywood comedy. The standoff in the jungle would keep them there for years, and a more fanciful cast of characters would be hard to imagine. Among them are a Cambridge ethnologist hoping to secure her academic reputation, a malicious gossip columnist who wields power by virtue of the secrets he has uncovered, and a Nazi war criminal who convinces the news-starved people of both groups that the war ended peacefully with a German-American alliance. VERDICT Mystery, murder, and mayhem abound in this highly imaginative, devilishly plotted adventure from Granta Best of Young British Writers Beauman, author of the Man Booker long-listed The Teleportation Accident.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2018
We described the ever-innovative, unabashedly unconventional Beauman's The Teleportation Accident (2013) as taking readers down a narrative wormhole. That wormhole just got deeper and, well, more corkscrewy. Beauman's latest, as brilliant as it is offbeat, begins in 1938 with an underwater wrestling match between an octopus and a longshoreman, a scene that quickly comes to feel quaintly realistic. Our narrator is a newspaper reporter called Zonulet, who moves on to become a CIA agentuntil the wormhole (in the form of a Mayan temple in the Honduran jungle) draws him down. The temple has attracted two very different sets of Americans: a group of New Yorkers assigned the task of disassembling the recently discovered structure and carting it back to Manhattan, and a Hollywood film crew determined to make a Conrad-inspired movie set at the temple. Twenty years onwe're into the '50s nowthe two groups remain at loggerheads, coexisting in a state that swings from Lord of the Flies to Brigadoon in the Jungle. There's plenty more, too, from CIA dirty tricks to some charming elements of metafiction, delivered by Zonulet's sometime lover, Vansaka, who complains that Zonulet/Beauman introduces a minor character in the beginning and then expects us to remember who he is 10,000 pages later. She's right, of course, but in the end, like Vansaka, we stick with Zonulet anyway. Wormholes are like that, especially if they're as flat-out beguiling as this one. Each twist leads to something more head-scratchingly tantalizing than what came before, and it doesn't hurt that the whole thing is just so damn clever and crazy funny. Don't even think about giving up partway in, because, as Zonulet explains, until it is too late to turn back, you have not really set out. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)