Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

You never forget your first Tom Robbins novel. Mine was particularly memorable because I was on the run from Manchester Public Libraries at the time.

It's the early 80s. A Levels are over, university still to come: and in between the two, a year long gap, half of it taken up with a doomed attempt at passing the Cambridge entrance exam. With that nonsense out of the way and a place in a more sensible academic establishment in the bag, that left me with six months to kill. Now more ambitious types would have investigated the possibilities of gainful employment, or taken the time to explore foreign countries. But not me: I stayed at home, claimed the dole and read like a bastard. Never regretted it, frankly. (It was during this period that I also appeared on local radio with three mates singing How Much Is That Doggie In The Window backwards, but that isn't strictly relevant here.)

There was only one minor crimp in this excellent plan, and I wasn't to discover it until halfway through my six month binge. You see, nobody bothered to tell me that it was illegal to take out 32 books at a time on a single library ticket. To be fair, they really should have noticed sooner. Manchester's libraries had just moved onto a computerised system, with a single barcoded ticket rather than the multiple bits of card you used to have to carry. As I was ripping through one book a day minimum, it seemed like a lot of effort to have to keep going back and forth to my local branch to withdraw the maximum eight books from there. I took a chance, and found that another library further down the road would allow me to take another eight books on the same ticket. It would appear that the individual branches weren't actually networked, or aware that you'd already taken out your quota from another one. I was running eight books at a time from four different libraries, until I got the rather snotty official letter telling me that actually, they were all networked, and I should stop playing silly buggers at once.

I read some classics and I read a lot of junk in those six months, but I made a couple of long-lasting literary friendships during that time. Probably the main one was with the work of Kurt Vonnegut, which was eventually consummated some years later when he made a rare British personal appearance at my university and brought the house down. But Tom Robbins made a hell of an impact as well, starting with that Camel-covered copy of Still Life With Woodpecker I read back in 1981 - if nothing else, because it was probably the dirtiest book I had ever read at that point. If Robbins hasn't left as indelible a mark on my psyche as Vonnegut, it's simply down to the scarcity of his work. Rumours abound of his writing process: starting with the most memorable opening sentence he can come up with, he apparently crafts his books a sentence at a time, never going back to tweak a paragraph later. As a result, you can expect to wait a good five years between one Robbins book and the next.

So counting on from Woodpecker in 1981, we've had Jitterbug Perfume, Skinny Legs And All, and Half Asleep In Frog Pyjamas... twenty years on from my brush with the wrath of Mancunian librarians, it must about time for a new Tom Robbins novel.

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates is a line from Rimbaud's poem A Season In Hell. It's implied that the leading character, Switters, may have encountered this work during the nine hours of Modern Poetry that took up a minor part of his education. Switters is not your average leading character - in fact, he's not even your average Robbins leading character, because he's male. To quote the back cover, Switters is "a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government, a pacifist who carries a gun, a vegetarian who sops up gravy, a cyberwhiz who hates computers..." At first the wildly inconsistent nature of Switters just feels like lazy writing, character-drawing-by-numbers: but get further into the book and you'll realise that the contradictions are fundamental to the philosophy of Switters, and ultimately the philosophy of the book as a whole.

After a rapid series of flash-forwards covering the main locations of the book - Peru, Syria, America and the Vatican - the story settles down and introduces us to Switters, CIA agent. (One way of coming to terms with Fierce Invalids is by imagining what a Tom Clancy book would read like if he'd dropped a shedload of acid before starting to write.) Switters hates everything the Agency stands for, but is willing to stay with it so he can find all new ways of creating mischief from within. He draws the distinction between 'cowboys' and 'angels' (the latter in the sense of the 'neutral angels' who sided neither with God nor Lucifer), and it's fairly obvious which side he sees himself on. In the course of the novel we get to see him on two missions, although it's what happens after each one that makes them interesting.

Switters' first job is to travel to Peru and talk a fellow agent out of resignation. While there, he's given an additional task by his grandmother Maestra: to release her pet parrot Sailor Boy back into the wild. This will end up involving a Heart Of Darkness-style journey up the Rio Ucayli to meet the Kandakandero tribe, and their shaman with the mysteriously hard-to-translate name. Switters will be shown the secrets of the universe, but he'll end up confined to a wheelchair as a result. He can still use his legs, mind you, but he's confined to a wheelchair: and his reluctance to explain why that is ends up putting a strain on his relationship with the three people he's closest to. Maestra, who probably understands him better than anyone else. Bobby Case, friend and fellow member of the C.R.A.F.T. Club (a loose organisation of CIA agents who meet up regularly for boozy sessions but Can't Remember A Fucking Thing afterwards). And sixteen-year-old stepsister Suzy, whose innocence Switters admires while simultaneously wanting to shag her brains out. Contradictions again.

Women may love these fierce invalids home from hot climates, but the CIA doesn't, and the wheelchair-bound Switters soon finds himself out of a job. He ends up teaming up with another renegade agent, Audubon Poe, running supplies out to Turkey. And it's on his way back from this mission that he makes an even more spectacular detour than his first. This time, he'll end up with a group of excommunicated nuns living in an oasis in the middle of the Syrian desert. He'll discover why they were excommunicated, get to know some of them better than you'd expect, learn to walk on stilts, and ultimately come face to face with the truth about the one person who may be even more contradictory than himself: a virgin who gave birth to a son some two thousand years ago.

Fierce Invalids was first published in the US in the summer of 2000, and was the victim of what can either be considered unlucky coincidence or elaborate conspiracy. One strand of Robbins' typically diverse narrative takes in the Three Prophesies of Fatima, a series of revelations reportedly made by the Virgin Mary during World War One. She made these three prophesies to warn mankind of the dangers of straying from the holy path. In the first, she warned of an even greater war to follow the current one if people didn't change their ways: in the second, she pleaded for the errors of Russia not to be propogated further. The third has been kept a secret by the Vatican for several decades, amid rumours of Popes fainting with horror when they read it. (I always liked Billy Connolly's guess that the Third Prophecy was a piece of paper with the words You Will Fall Over written on it.)

There's been much speculation over the years about the contents of this prophecy: so in the pre-millennial panic that accompanied the writing of Fierce Invalids, it's no surprise that Robbins wove a quest for its meaning into the novel. But mysteriously, mere weeks after the book's initial publication, the Vatican suddenly decided to make the Third Prophecy public: it turned out to be a reference to a Papal assassination, possibly the attempt on JPII's life in 1981. Robbins' guess at the Third Prophecy is somewhat different, but a hell of a lot more intriguing, even without the surreal interpretation Switters has to give it to make the plot work.

As ever, Robbins' writing is (to use one of Switters' favourite adjectives, but in the non-perjorative sense) just so damn vivid. Switters is an inspired creation: the more I read about him, the more I thought that a movie of this book could really work with someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman in the lead. It'd certainly work better than Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, the only Robbins novel filmed so far: for once he's written a story with a genuine plot that gathers real page-turning momentum as it all comes together at the end.

But Cowgirls had a plot too, of sorts. And the real reason why that movie failed was the typical curse of the so-called unfilmable book. By converting it to a screenplay, you lose the description, the narrative voice, the thing that made the soliloquy to a brown paper bag (read offscreen by Robbins himself) the only bit of the Cowgirls movie that really worked. Robbins' prose bursts with unexpected metaphors and drips love juice from every orifice, until you're grabbing strangers in the street and quoting paragraphs at them in a desperate attempt to share this singular worldview with the planet.

Take the splendid sequence which ponders on what would happen if God and Satan decided to settle out of court and divide their assets. "Would God be satisfied to take loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while allowing Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York steaks, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all-night, no-holds-barred, nasty 'can't-get-enough-of-you' hot-as-hell fucks?... More than likely, God would holler, 'Whoa! Wait just a minute there, Lucifer. I'll take the pool halls and juke joints, you take the church basements and Boy Scout jamborees. You handle content for a change, pal. I'm going to take - style!'"

But Robbins' style is there to provide ballast for some pretty serious content. Along the way, we get an analysis of the importance of levity in Western culture. We learn how anyone missing any of the vital qualities of Humour, Imagination, Eroticism, Spirituality, Rebelliousness and Aesthetics is equivalent to one of humanity's missing links and should not be trusted with anything, let alone the positions of authority that seem to be the exclusive domain of people lacking in all six. We are treated to a plausible theory that action movies are popular because the continuous destruction of property appeals to an inner desire to free ourselves from the shackles of material goods. We ponder on why the Virgin Mary appears in public so frequently when her son hardly shows up at all. And because Switters knows the word for 'vagina' in seventy-one different languages, we learn most of those as well. This book's an education, dammit.

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates isn't Tom Robbins' best novel (an honour which I still think falls to Skinny Legs And All, the best novel by anybody). But for entertainment, mental stimulation and down-and-dirty fun, there's still hardly anyone else out there who can touch the guy. Buy, steal or borrow a copy and find out for yourself. But if a librarian in Manchester gives you a funny look and refuses to loan you a copy, it's nothing to do with me. Being a monkey, and all.

Links

No Exit Press have started publishing Tom Robbins' work in the UK, and are pumping some serious promotional moolah into him. If pressure of work hadn't stopped me from going, I could have told you about a reading of Fierce Invalids they recently organised in London, but no matter. Their site has details of the book (in hardback, oversized paperback and paperback), along with two earlier Robbins classics they're reprinting (Still Life With Woodpecker and Jitterbug Perfume).

Yahoo Events have a half-hour audio stream of a Tom Robbins live reading that he gave in New York in 2000. The sound quality's atrocious, but have a listen if you're (checks statistics) one of the 74.4% of readers with Windows Media Player, or one of the 10.3% with Real Player.

AFTRlife is the best Tom Robbins fan site on the web (acronymically named after the newsgroup alt.fan.tom-robbins that's dedicated to his work). Loads of goodies here, including a page about Fierce Invalids.

Guardian Unlimited Books had a little Robbinsfest at the beginning of 2001 (when Fierce Invalids hit the UK in hardback). They helpfully reprinted chapter one of the new book so you could get a taste of it, and managed to persuade Robbins to participate in a webchat. Except 'webchat' in the Robbins universe means that people asked him questions in January 2001, and he sent back answers three months later. But the answers were worth waiting for, including the truth about the rumour that Robbins' first book, Another Roadside Attraction, killed Elvis.

January Magazine has a typically rambunctious interview with the man himself, accompanied by the best recent photo of him I could find (which is why I stole it for use above).

The Monkey Mall is as open as it ever was to sell you Fierce Invalids should you so wish (and based on previous experience, you won't). Go to WHSmith for the UK paperback and hardback, or to Amazon.com for the US paperback and hardback. (The latter has another recent Robbins interview for your pleasure. Kinda chatty for a recluse, isn't he?)

Darenet is the homepage of writer and critic Michael Dare. His article How To Write Like Tom Robbins is a rare insight into the latter's creative process, based on a period where the two tried to collaborate on a screenplay.

A Season In Hell is the Rimbaud poem that Switters steals the novel's catchphrase (and title) from. See if you can spot it in Bad Blood (Robbins was obviously working from a different translation).

The Vatican's homepage has the official announcement of the Third Prophecy of Fatima. Believe them, if you like.

The CIA, you suspect, isn't capable of employing an agent as fascinating as Switters. But you do wonder about the sort of mind that came up with the CIA Homepage For Kids. Help your children find out about the most secretive and dangerous governmental organisation in the world, as they play with a Shockwave disguise kit and meet the CIA's Canine Corps. I'd just like to emphasise that I'm not taking the piss here.

May 6th 2001