Lee D. Thompson' s Apastoral further confirms that Corona/Samizdat is a press interested in publishing work that challenges the formal and stylistic norms dominating most literary fiction (in English, at least), but also engages with cultural and political themes that are very much of current concern.
The humor in Apastoral might be called satirical, except that it is actually something closer to absurdist, and the novel itself might be identified as a kind of speculative or dystopian fiction, a science fiction novel with laughs. "Kafkaesque" would not be an unwarranted label, if Kafka had as one of his major influences The Three Stooges, and the novel's title suggests it was likely conceived in part as a parody of the pastoral genre. All of these elements are relevant in considering the effect of Thompson's novel, which, far from making it unfocused or incoherent, is in fact what makes the novel compelling: ultimately the impression it leaves is that the writer has taken the basic premise--a method of transferring a human brain to an animal body has been devised and is being used as a form of judicial punishment--and let the premise develop as it will rather than forcing it to act as the vehicle for predetermined meaning.
The novel's first-person narrator, called Bones, is a small-time crook who is the victim of one such surgical procedure, his brain removed and implanted in the body of a sheep. He has been transported to a prison farm whether other criminals have been subject to similar transformations into various animal bodies and shipped out as part of a program called "Constock." (Beginning with one Sylvester Moll, a serial killer of children who was the first person to receive the surgical sentence, his brain placed in a pig.) The novel chronicles Bones's attempts to adjust to his new transmogrified state, alternating with the story of the botched robbery attempt by his hapless gang of criminal cronies that resulted in Bones's trial and conviction. Eventually Bones manages to escape from the farm and makes his way back to the city, where he meets up again with an animal rights activist who had previously tried to help him and who now offers him refuge on a farm she has purchased. There we leave Bones to whatever rustic fate awaits him.
Bones is narrating his story, of course, from his present incarnation as a sheep, which immediately complicates our efforts to interpret the story he tells us. Even before we consider the various visions and dreams he increasingly experiences in his sheep-human state, Bones is inherently an unreliable narrator. His memories of the criminal milieu in which he previously resided, of the events leading up to the robbery-gone-wrong and the subsequent application of "justice" in his case, seem oddly free of the effects of the brain transplant--brains need to be "shrunk" to fit the size of the cranium into which they are being loaded--to which he seems to be subject in the episodes chronicling his new life as a sheep. Putting aside questions about how Bones is able to compose his narrative in the first place, since he is, indeed, a sheep, the very idea of a character like Bones implicitly asking to be taken seriously as the narrator of a credible work of fiction is sufficiently preposterous that we should expect the humor to be more broad farce than purposeful mockery.
Regarding the novel as neither satire nor an absurdist comedy but instead a version of a speculative science fiction narrative might help us in interpreting it as the projection of a future dystopia in which technology has continued to advance but its moral intelligence has continued to decline. But again the novel's comic exaggeration makes it hard to really take its projection into the future seriously as a plausible prediction of what might befall us if present tendencies continue on their course. The depiction of the circumstances attending Bones's apprehension, trial, conviction, and sentencing is a very funny lampoon of the attitudes and procedures already latent in the American justice system, but the fatuity on display among supposedly trained professionals (lawyers, therapists) actually clashes with the notion that technologies might also have advanced to the point that brain transplants are possible. Unless we assume that all of the elements in Thompson's story, from the ditzy lawyer who obtained her law degree after a "six-month intensive" and a one-week apprenticeship, to the animal rights organization, PETABBY, long on ideals and short on competence, to the investment of authority in the penal farm to wolves implanted with the brains of prison guards, have been invoked as devices that further the novel's essential buffoonery.
Which is not to say that Apastoral has nothing to communicate about the practices of incarceration or animal rights, the two "issues" to which it most immediately calls attention. But the carceral state is not a direct target: what seems unjust in Bones's case is not the form of punishment per se, but the process by which that punishment is ultimately declared. Bones is in fact innocent of the crime for which he is convicted, but the incompetence in the system in which he is thrust insures that this can never be discovered and that his fate is foreordained. He is imprisoned in the new body into which he is placed, but his actual physical circumstances are, well, pastoral, however threatening they still are from his new animal perspective. (The novel might be taken as a satire of a certain kind of "humanitarian" prison reform rather than imprisonment itself, a reform that in this case only allows society to mete out punishment without confronting the implications of it at all.) Paradoxically, Bones's "incarceration" might ultimately be a blessing, as it seems likely he will find greater happiness on the farm with his sheep girlfriend, Heather, than he ever would in his former life as a small-time crook. (If the wolves don't come after him.)
Thus Apastoral certainly could lead the reader to reflection on the subjects it treats, even though in my view they are subjects that inspire the novel's humor and invention rather than serve as its center of interest. It shares with the other books under review here this joining of conceptually adventurous, verbally resourceful fiction with politically resonant subjects in a way that inevitably raises the question of what the writer is trying to "say." Gilbert Sorrentino proposed that the appropriate way to think of "content" in a literary work was its realization through "something said"--the literary art itself says what it must, not the artist. Novels like Apastoral are mostly content with the something said, but the focus on politically charged topics does cheat a bit by making it more likely that the "said" is heard.
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