The Wooden Sea

Frannie McCabe was an obnoxious juvenile delinquent in his teens, but has settled down into comfortable middle age in the small town of Crane's View as its chief of police; like other Jonathan Carroll protagonists, the hero of The Wooden Sea is about to find himself caught up in uncanny goings-on. First a dog walks into his office and drops dead--more importantly, it will not stay buried. Then a quarreling couple simply disappears, and then Frannie finds himself haunted by his younger, more abrasive self, and by visions of the last day of his life, as an old man about to be knocked down by a motorbike in Vienna.

What all this means and what lessons Frannie is supposed to take from it all are where the questions lie; anyone who has read an earlier Carroll novel will know the sorts of thing that are liable to happen, the sorts of thing that they are likely to mean--but any reader of an earlier Carroll novel will almost certainly be buying any of his books they can get hold of, anyway. This is an inventive and moving fantasy by a writer who more or less defined dark fantasy as a critical term. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

Immensely popular abroad, Carroll (The Marriage of Sticks) has yet to achieve commensurate stature on his native shore. His latest novel combines George Perec's pleasure in puzzles and Philip Dick's interest in metaphysics. Frannie McCabe is the 47-year-old police chief of Crane's View, N.Y., who one day adopts an old, three-legged stray dog. This is typical of his style, as his wife, Magda, recognizes: "The more goofy they are, the more you like them, huh, Fran?" The dog, Old Vertue, dies; the weirdness begins when McCabe tries to bury him. The burial is interrupted by a report about the perpetually battling Schiavo couple, who seem to have tidied up and abandoned their usually squalid house. McCabe's investigation of the domicile turns up a bizarrely patterned feather which, along with the dog's carcass, reappears in the trunk of Magda's car the next day, spooking McCabe. Even spookier, Pauline, McCabe's stepdaughter, now has a tattoo that exactly matches the feather. Then McCabe's world turns surreal: he is visited by his teenage self. The adolescent McCabe, who had been a notorious delinquent, leads his older self to Astropel, a black extraterrestrial. The aliens know Crane's View has some connection to the cosmic puzzle of the universe itself, but they need McCabe to figure out the specifics. Astropel shuttles Frannie back and forth in time, piling up such clues as a maniac Dutch millionaire from 2030 and a koan ("How do you row a boat on a wooden sea?") pronounced by a dead high school girl. Carroll's best set piece shows McCabe watching Crane's View physically fast forward from the '60s to the '90s. Although the story's resolution is weaker than its buildup, this wonderfully offbeat novel will further augment Carroll's growing reputation as the pop writer's pop writer. (Feb.)
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