One Big Damn Puzzler

Peter Brooke's enthusiastic narration makes John Harding's unconventional satire a listening delight. A white lawyer arrives on a tiny island in the South Pacific intending to make reparations for the damage done to the population by the Americans during WWII. The island boasts a large number of feral pigs, an unusually large number of natives who are missing limbs, and Managua, a tribesman who's attempting to translate HAMLET into something understandable for the locals. (Managua's translation of Hamlet's famous soliloquy gives the novel its title: "Is be, or is be not, is be one big damn puzzler." Brooke's delivery of pidgin argot; taboos; and odd sexual, religious, and scatological practices perfectly captures the gently mocking tones of Harding's sociological, anthropological, and Shakespearean humor. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

February 26, 2007
Set on a fictional South Pacific island inhabited by black bantam pigs and a clan of nearly-naked eccentrics, this excessively zany British import has a raging conscience and a muted heart. Managua, a one-legged tribesman (most of his fellow inhabitants are missing limbs), is obsessed with transcribing Hamlet
into island pidgin and finds his unconventional paradise disturbed when William Hardt, a white American lawyer, arrives to arrange reparations for natives whose limbs have been blown off by the landmines left behind years ago by the American military. Hardt soon witnesses a staggering array of peculiarities: the "the shitting beach" where villagers empty their bowels every morning; transvestite men forced into dressing in drag by parents who wanted girls; vision quests brought on by consuming "kassa," a red hallucinogenic paste. A few years after his departure from the island, Hardt's successful mission has drastic consequences for the island. Journalist Harding (While the Sun Shines
) is an equal opportunity and brutally sharp lampooner, though he sometimes misses (notably in his invocation of 9/11 as a parallel to corporate America's exploitation of the island). Folly, silliness and cultural sucker punches come at full speed in this ribald, imaginative farce.