Now that is what I Call A Dead Parrot.

Dale Myers

30 August 2008

The Defenestration of Bob T Hash III is a short novel, but it appears longer. It appears so long as an awful blind date. But since it needs to be true that there's a book for everybody and an assembly for each book, I suggest that you purchase copies for these folk on your present list:.

Tortured teenagers who struggle daily with the query of if there exists a self, or if each of us is just a total of cultural or genetic info. Folk who believe they are smarter than 95 % of the people. And all this in the context of a picture book built to teach English as a 2nd language? You can cross these people off your present list with impunity ; you will never see them again. Bob is Boss of a company that teaches foreign languages thru picture books, his most well-liked volume being Forward With British .

, a title that is funny on the face of it the 1st time you read it, and the 2nd and even the 3rd, but by the 12th time it's funny just if you are starved for entertainment. And trying to find 2 sets of lost golfing clubs from an incompetent airline in German, describing each club in that language, is funny up to a point. And, naturally, all this does suggest the general futility of communication, which may lead to a meditation on the futility of human existence. When you set aside all the fashionable, postmodern stuff here, the writer gets into difficulty with something as conventional and old-fashioned as characterization. Kafka's Gregor Samsa, after he turned into that cockroach, was unhappy, uncomfortable, limited, unlucky. David Deans's pet parrot is a stuck up, self-satisfied bore. Bob T Hash III, the businessperson he turns into, is also a stuck up, self-satisfied bore.

The picture book the parrot / Bob Hash lives in and revises as he attempts toward an eighth edition is uninteresting. The other half the parrot inherits is, excuse me, two-dimensional. All the communication here -- and I know, it's meant to be that way -- is bad parody, totally prosaic. Yes, yes, you see the writer's point, but could not he have had a little mercy on the reader and made that point in one hundred less pages? It's a load more fun to draft this postmodern material than it is to read it. Or ( you believe ) you are smarter th an 95 p.c of us.