East of Laughter

by R.A. Lafferty

There have always been the Twenty One Pillars of Rectitude who sustain the Seven Saints to insure the sanity of the world; Seven Technicians to insure its correct mechanical working; and Seven Scribbling Giants to write its scenarios and histories. The Saints and Technicians were always in plentiful supply. But not so the Scribbling Giants.So when Atrox Fabulinus, the greatest of the Scribbling Giants, was most foully murdered with his own nine-foot-long goose feather quill, the World staggered with the collapse of its most sustaining pillar. Then the remaining Scribbling Giants (all of them very old and tired) cried out for replacements so they could go to their restful deaths.This is the story of how the World, at the uneven changing of its supporting pillars, staggered and reeled.It is also the story of the Group of Twelve, an Group remarkable for its creativity and elegance, and how it set out to sustain the World in its new days of tottering terror.Whether the Group will be successful, indeed whether they have been successful, remains to be answered on the ninth day of the week, east of Laughter.

Genres: Science Fiction

195 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.

Reviews

[Perry Whitford · Rating 5 out of 5]

First thing's first, this entirely excellent book is cursed with the most entirely awful cover illustration in the history of publication, bar none. Quite a claim, I admit, as the science fiction genre alone is riddled with such monstrosities, but just look at the thing!

Never judge a book by its cover folks. East of Laughter is a humdinging Lafferty laffer from start to finish, a near-indescribable riot of nonsense, profundity and several more types of nonsense.

The Group of Twelve (of whom there are at least fifteen) are a funny bunch who become aware that they may be merely dreaming their lives and not part of reality, that the world they live in is in fact a fiction from the pen (that is, nine foot quill) of Atrox Fabulinas, the greatest of the Severn Scribbling Giants, known also as the Roman Rabelais.

The group includes, amongst others, a computerized fish tycoon and his wife, 'an artist in all the arts'; a ventriloquist mathematician and his talking belly-button; a golden panther with the Mark of Cain who looked like he had been drawn into life by someone who had never seen a cat; and a jolly young Irish woman born twice over, the second time from out of a giant goose-egg.

Things go awry when one of the group is murdered, and before long they all become 'angry with Atrox for his killing people and for his other sillinesses.' But then Atrox himself cops it, leaving nobody to write the narrative of the world, whether it be real or not.

If I have made it all sound a little bit too alike Terry Pratchett I apologize for that - Lafferty, unlike Pratchett, is decidedly not for nerds.

You couldn't make this stuff up.
Lafferty could though.

[Daniel Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, what the hell. While I'm spinning out spur-of-the-moment reviews of books I read years ago, why not this indescribable masterpiece of the sane-posing-VERY-convincingly-as-the-insane? (I actually wrote an overlong four-part 'review' - romp more like - of it a number of years ago on my Lafferty blog, The Ants of God Are Queer Fish, but that review's in dire need of updating.)

You think Chesterton was good at carnivalising the true, the good, and the beautiful by dressing it up in the motley of the absurd, the wild, and the grotesque? You haven't seen anything yet. Meet Lafferty, called the 'American Chesterton' by some. This appellation means, among other things, that in addition to Chesterton's rollicking evocation of Old World European wit and wisdom and its connection to Greco-Roman epic and thought, are also thrown in: the tall tales of the American frontier, the wry humour and ancestral sagacity of Southwestern Native Americans, a G.I. curiosity for the folk mythopoeia of South Sea islanders, Irish blarney, Syrian mysticism, 20th century earth sciences and engineering, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and, honestly, much more. All this through a more thoroughgoing Thomism than even Chesterton's. Lafferty is a wild ride, folks, and East of Laughter is one of the wildest.

It's a novel heavy on ideas, especially about whether the characters are conscious and whether their world is real or not (written long before The Matrix popularised - and trivialised? - such questions). It's also dense with nested narratives and sprawling wonders and horrors. Yet it skims along, effervescent in tone and style (if also baffling as it sprawls).

It is, as the atrocious cover indicates, Lafferty's main sustained incursion into the realm of Western fairy tale and mythology. There is an actual giant and an actual faun. Yet the novel is set in the 20th century and opens with a description of an Oklahoman couple and their relations to their personal computers. (In order to get a computer to work wonders for you, the narrative explains, you need to give it constant company, so it won't get lonely. Stabling a goat with it will do the trick. But letting it get 'infested' by a poltergeist is even better. This couple opts for the latter. Yet this wonderfully freakish arrangement is not brought up again after its mention in the first chapter or so!) And there are also many other strange beings besides a giant and a faun. A shape-shifting panther person, a man with a talking belly-growth that is a separate entity (the two of whom have a background in Vaudeville), a statue of Christ (which is totally silent and inert, yet is listed among the characters and does somehow communicate just by how the light and shadow play upon it), and many other personages and beings cross the stage briefly or at length (sometimes just by mention; there are some pipe-smoking bat-winged Englishman that come into it late in the book, and some Ifrits or Genies, an Archangel, ocean ogres, etc.).

Though much of this is tossed in as flavourful asides, there are certain characters and plot developments that are consistent throughout. The kaleidoscopic swirl of myth and magic that surrounds and penetrates the plot by no means obscures it into oblivion. Some of it is pretty straightforward to follow it seems to me. There's a murder mystery element for a while, and some simple structural handles: moving through the days of the week (albeit it's a nine-day week, just to keep us on our toes!)to a new European locale each day by instantaneous travel, exploring the new environs (Castles, gardens, seasides, etc.), and continuing the discussion about reality. There are gruesome deaths and there's a sort of social-psychic struggle for a better or worse reality. Its plot won't move you like a normal novel, but it engaged me plenty and made me feel certain stakes at the idea level at least.

But I was in it (as with most of Lafferty's works) for the wonders and grotesqueries, the bizarre marvels and the coruscating philosophical discussions - not for suspense or relatability of characters or other traditional draws of good fiction. But this IS good fiction. It's certainly not the place to start with Lafferty. (You can't even buy this damn book for decent price anyway. I guess this 'review' is for those who've already read it or who are just curious to hear about Lafferty's more rare and arcane works.)

It's gonna take another read before I can say something sensible about this book's artistry and point. Even years after reading it I'm still reeling. (I did attempt to explicate some of the novel's meaning in my original blog posts on it.) There is a wise and sometimes poignant meditation on whether we can become real people or not, whether we can enjoy a real world or not, deeply embedded in the fast-and-thick oddities of this narrative. It is a timely meditation for societies turning themselves and their environments into automata and simulacra.

[Tanya Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've given this five stars because I read it about twenty years ago and can still remember large sections, especially the discusssion on what to do if we discover the whole world isn't real. Weirdly, I can remember very little of the story, but the impression the book created has stayed with me, which is one sign of a good story. Its an odd book, a very odd book and I would heartily recommend it to anyone looking for something a bit weird.