HERE are some of the interesting facts that one of the characters in this wonderfully original, dotty and ultimately romantic first novel reads in Weird But True Magazine:
"There is a Why, Arizona."
"Lara Lakehouse was the first woman Superior Judge in Arizona. She weighed over two hundred pounds and owned a goat called Liberace."
"Clifton had a jail blasted out of solid rock. The miner who did the blasting invested his pay check in snakehead whiskey and shot up Harvey's Dance Hall. He thus became the first resident of the jail."
These facts have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this story of the revival and redemption of an old man in a small town in the Arizona desert but they may give you an idea of the book's unusual flavour.
The principal centre of events is Bagdad, which, I have discovered on your behalf, is situated one hundred miles north west of Phoenix and 30 miles west of Skull Valley. No, it is not the Bagdad where they made that charming movie, The Bagdad Cafe. That is Bagdad, California, on Route 66. You would miss Bagdad, Arizona, if you drove along the state's western highway; it is even more obscure than the Californian one.
At the outset, the Bagdad Bugle announces the death of Ethan Pierce, 91, former south western representative of Bell Boy Elevators, Inc, of Chicago. Lightning has destroyed his house and evidently killed him. A local doctor certifies that Ethan is dead, reducing the local population to 312. He is respectfully mourned, laid out in a coffin, ready for burial.
But Ethan is either not quite dead or he is miraculously born again, still 91 years of age yet feeling strangely chipper. The lightning has actually galvanised him, it seems when he holds a light bulb it glows. The touch of his hands starts a car with a flat battery. There's a family reconciliation he must achieve before he can rest in peace. There are some interesting facts about Ethan Pierce.
Jeremy Poolman, his publisher discloses, was born and educated in England, but spends much of his time in the United States and on Waiheke Island, New Zealand. From his antipodal world viewpoint, he has zoomed in to focus intimately on one of Arizona's off beat communities and one of its Indian (native American) reservations, as well as glancing incidentally at Tucson and Boulder, Colorado. The descriptions of places, weather and fauna - especially the people - are authentic, providing a sound foundation without which the novel's abnormalities would be difficult to accept.
Of night in the desert, Poolman writes:
In the cottonwoods beyond the highway a horned owl gathered himself, cool on his perch, while cactus wrens and morning doves returned to their nests in spikey chollas. In the mesquite, a silver grey coyote sniffed for mice and kaibab ground squirrels, and a long nosed snake took 15 minutes to swallow the stiffening corpse of a rat. Lizards scurried; a scorpion paralysed its victims.
This sort of detail makes it possible to believe in characters such as Jimmy Chai, an 18 year old Indian usually confined to his reservation, where he is obliged to make silver and turquoise jewellery, and spends a lot of time in the cockpit of a derelict, wing less Dakota, dreaming of flying, and Jubal Early, the certifiably deranged correspondent of Weird but True Magazine, who has been assigned to investigate Ethan's resurrection.
A bright debut. {CORRECTION} 96020200121
