Our last review for Hallowe’en 2017, again by Randy M., is a classic that may not initially strike you as particularly ghostly. But stay with it – it will remain with you long after reading!
THE LAND OF LAUGHS by Jonathan Carroll (Orb, 2001; Viking, 1980)
…
“The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one’s seen.”
— From chapter 2
Thomas Abbey is an English teacher in a New England prep school, a little adrift in spite of having a job and a home. Being the son of the famous actor Stephen Abbey, who comes across as a little Spencer Tracy and a little Humphrey Bogart, has drawbacks: Thomas is dissatisfied with the young women who are interested in him out of curiosity about his father, and equally dissatisfied trying to teach students who are unprepared and uninterested in literature, and senses he’s wasting time while awaiting his real calling, whatever that might be.
Life begins to change in a bookstore when he meets Saxony Gardner as she purchases a rare work by Marshall France, Thomas’ favorite writer, author of The Land of Laughs. Getting to know each other, Thomas’ collection of masks and Saxony’s work with marionettes somehow resonate off each other, different but similar idiosyncrasies that even relate to their shared love of Marshall France’s work. Within a short time they become a couple and begin on a dream project, the biography of France whose life, in spite of his fame, has never been properly recorded.
The problem with following your dream is it involves risk, not least the risk of intersecting the dreams of others. Even before reaching France’s home in Galen, Missouri the biography begins to appear less straight-forward than anticipated as contradictions appear between what little is written about France and what the people who knew him remember. Once in Galen, France’s daughter, Anna, and the townspeople are all pleasant and forthcoming, yet often speak as though from a different understanding of France and his work. In the end, there are goals and agendas, and the aims and manipulations of others threaten more than Thomas and Saxony’s work.
A number of years ago I came across an on-line site that described Carroll’s work as a secular search for God. From what I’ve read by Carroll, that sounds on target. The Land of Laughs explores the relationship of creator to created, the responsibility of the creator, and the desperation of those who love the creation to continue it after the creator is gone, all while depicting the relationship between biographer and subject, reader/viewer and writer/artist, and father and child. At times Thomas’s relationship to his dead father parallels Anna’s relationship to her dead father and at times they appear the antithesis of each other as Anna curates her father’s legacy and Thomas struggles to find a place in his father’s legacy.
If you were to begin The Land of Laughs without prior knowledge, you would not know immediately that it was a fantasy. A kind of memoir begins to fade into a mystery and like a good mystery writer Carroll inserts clues and hints concerning Marshall France, and his relationship to his daughter, Anna, and to the people in Galen, Missouri. Over half the novel passes before any true element of fantasy appears, and only then do the causes of mystery begin to reveal themselves. This is a huge risk since a reader with expectations may quit reading before the expectations are fulfilled. I strongly suggest you persevere as the novel transforms from character study to awkward romance to mystery to fantasy to an ending without any of the conventional trappings of horror stories that all the same is chilling in its implications.
Other works of interest:
Bones of the Moon, Voice of Our Shadow, The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll
THE LAND OF LAUGHS by Jonathan Carroll (Orb, 2001; Viking, 1980)
254 pages
ISBN: 978-0312873110
And that concludes our look at things Halloween this year. We hope you’ve found it useful: have a great one!
