I sometimes like to read books which are completely outside me usual genres, and this one, Retromancer, qualifies on every count. I don’t even know what genre this book would come into, but perhaps “fantasy humour”, as with Terry Pratchett wouldn’t be too far out. And let’s face it my reading is usually just too serious that it probably does me some good to read something as ridiculous and downright amusing as Robert Rankin’s latest offering.
Let me set the scene by quoting from the cover description:
There is big and evil magic abroad upon the face of the Earth. History has been changed. The Germans have won WWII. America is a nuclear wasteland. And worst of all, the breakfast menu at The Wife’s Legs Cafe in Brentford is serving Bratwurst rather than the proper big boys’ British banger.
Enter Hugo Rune, the guru’s guru, and his able assistant, the boy Rizla. Together they move around through time and space to challenge the dark forces which have brought catastrophe on the world, and hopefully apply some corrective combination of magic and science to rectify things.
But dont be put off by the essential silliness of the subject matter. Rankin gives the impression of enjoying himself immensely with his constant word-plays and digressions. The book is full of ironic quips, cultural references and verbal trickery which stop you in your tracks to read them again.
The book is set in the London Borough of Brentford, not the most glamorous of London’s suburbs, and yet it is a place somehow transformed for the reader by frequent glimpses of another Brentford where titanic forces battle for the fate of the world. Brentford has become a sort of portal, as in the old Celtic belief, that there are places in the world where you can slip through into the another land which runs parallel to ours and is the origin of so many events which happen to us on this side of eternity.
Hugo and Rizla find themselves in a 1944 Brentford, a war-weary place where a grey urban landscape where years of food-rationing and shortages. Into this drabness, Rune and Rizla have a dozen of so encounters with foes real and not so real in an attempt to undo the events which led to a 21st century German republic of Britain.
It would be pointless to describe how they do this and what the outcome is. This book is fun, and the experience of reading it is what matters, not the profundity or otherwise of the story. It is a book for a cold winter’s day, of which we have had far too many in the last couple of weeks, when it’s late afternoon and the reading light is on shedding a pool of light on its pages. I’ve enjoyed reading it. I was going to review Insitute Benjamenta by Robert Walser, but Rankin has reminded me that reading should sometimes be a simple pleasure which doesn’t have to tax the brain all that much.
