We've waited for this book with the patience of a Zen master, (perhaps, it is all part of Robbins' plan?) I don't want to reveal too much, but the novel, entitled "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates" has this on its dust jacket: "This book was inspired by an entry from Bruce Chatwin's journal, by a CIA agent I met in Southeast Asia, by the mystery surrounding the lost prophecy of the Virgin of Fatima, by the increasing evidence that the interplay of opposites is the engine that runs the universe, and by the embroidered memories of old Terry and the Pirates comic books". The protagonist of Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a U.S. operative very loosely inspired by a friend of the author. "Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are enormously popular in the CIA," claims Switters. "Not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best." The term "invalid" of the title is somewhat misleading but during his first mission (to set free the ancient parrot belonging to his very wise if intractable grandmother), he becomes enchanted by a spell cast by a pyramid-headed shaman of the Amazonian Kandakandero tribe named "End of Time". In return for a mind-bending trip into cosmic truth- "the Hallways of Always" -Switters must not let his feet touch the earth, or he'll die. Not one to take this possibility lightly, Switters promptly acquires a wheelchair, which becomes his preferred mode of locomotion throughout the greater part of his adventures. And wild and wonderful those adventures prove to be! The narrative meanders its twisting and beguiling way through Peru, Seattle, Turkey and the Middle East, with our erstwhile protagonist seeking refuge and solace in a desert stronghold which turns out to house a group of renegade nuns, whose Mother Superior served as a model for Henri Matisse in her youth, among many other interesting details. Switters promptly falls in love with one of his saviours, but his feelings aside, realises that it is part of his mission to help them fight the forces of destruction, as personified by the Vatican hierarchy. Can the nuns convince the Pope to approve of birth control -to "zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt" and "wrest free from a woman's shoulders the boa of spermatozoa"? The book is loaded with marvelous and outlandish metaphors as the one above, and is highly entertaining, in all of its wisdom, humour, playfulness, irreverence, colourful similes, life-affirming celebration of eroticism, and philosophical bents. Tom Robbins is one of the few truly subversive writers out there, and is a treasure to all of us who are trying to hold back the waves of mediocrity and conformism that are threatening to over-run the world. Here are some samples for your reading pleasure: [If End of Time's thesis, that civilized man's powers were attributable to laughter, failed to strike Switters as unduly outlandish, it was probably because it was not so far removed from a favorite idea of Maestra's: her theory of the missing link. "What is it," Maestra has asked quite rhetorically, "that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it's exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism - as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons - Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. "Now," she'd gone on to say, "since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce? And in those cases where the defining qualities are virtually nonexistent, well, what we have are entities that are north of the animal kingdom but south of humanity, they fall somewhere in between, they're our missing links." In his grandmother's opinion, the missing link of scientific lore was neither extinct nor rare. "There are more of them, in fact, that there are of us, and since they actually seem to be multiplying, Darwin's theory of evolution is obviously wrong." Maestra's stand was that missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority. "That could be problematic," Switters had said, straining at the age of twenty, to absorb this rant, "because only people who, you know, lack those six qualities seem to ever run for any sort of office." Maestra throughly agreed, although she was undecided whether it was because full-fledged human beings simply had more interesting things to do with their lives than marinate them in the torpid waters of the public trough or if it was because only missing links, in the reassuring blandness of their banality, could expect to attract the votes of a missing link majority. In any event, of the six qualities that distinguished the human from the subhuman, both grandmother and grandson agreed that the Imagination and Humor were probably the most crucial.] "Taboos were superstitions with fangs on them, and if not transcended, they punctured the brain and drained the spirit. A taboo was a crystallized knot of societal fear and must be unraveled, cut through, or smashed, if people were to set themselves free. As a path to liberation, ancient Greeks and holy Hindus would deliberately break any and all of their cultures' prevailing taboos in order to loosen their hold, destroy their power. It was an active, somewhat radical method of triumphing over fear by confronting that which frightened: embracing it, dancing with it, absorbing it, and moving past it. It was a casting out of demons." Tom Robbins "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates" Highly recommended.

Cone