My husband, poet Zackary Sholem Berger, reviews Ron Tanner‘s Kiss Me, Stranger: An Illustrated Novel
Many a reader of a novel set in the future realizes with dread, around page 50 or so, that the future as the novelist understands it no longer includes a sense of humor. Part of this is due to narrative demands. If the human race has been elevated to a higher plane of existence and now draws its sustenance exclusively from (say) cosmic rays, someone has to explain to us how this works. No time for jokes when there’s physics to be learned and the Zombies of Planet Zeta are slavering at the heels of our hero.
Ron Tanner’s future-world is different. (The flap copy informs us that the story could take place in the past, present, or future – but the exact temporal location is beside the point. Tanner’s novel is an example of a genre.) We’re plunged into it without so much as an introduction to the events that left all of civilization up a creek. We eventually learn what’s going on, but the point here is the narrative, the characters (in Tanner’s world, the future is peopled by recognizable human beings!), and the jokes. It’s not slapstick, but it’s hilarious. After all, what other dystopia starts with Penelope, a mother of 13 children, day-dreaming about slow-roasting her own arm for their dinner? Triskadekaphobia was never so fleshy.
Tanner owes the possibility of this book to George Orwell. But while Orwell’s humor in 1984 was secondary to the dystopia of the plot, Tanner’s whimsy goes hand in hand with (and is just as screwed up as) the future he plots here.
I won’t spoil it for you, but here’s a thumbnail sketch: two warring factions – practically indistinguishable a la Life of Brain, even down to their names (the PM and the RM) — are hammering each other with rockets (the so-called Screaming Mimis) while everything falls to pieces. Line drawings by the author illustrate the remains and reminders of past infrastructure that flit past the heroes of this tale, who are all confused about what they should be doing and to what party they should belong. The aforementioned mother loses her oldest son and her husband to these opposing factions, and heads out to look for them, after assaulting a government official who is collecting scrap metal.
Tanner’s madcap tragic lyricism is fun to read. To take a random sample: “Crazy Peter won’t stop smiling, talking about his missing foot, and Duane is getting drunk, chewing on his baguette, telling Lon that now Lon can get serious and meet some girls and seriously have some serious fun.” There is love, violence, death, and hope, sometimes all at once. Come to think of it, perhaps the flap copy is right. All those things mixed up could identify nearly anyone, anywhere, anytime at all.
