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Dec. 3rd, 2010 08:16 pmAfter the epic fail of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters I felt the need to cleanse my palate with some shorter and funnier titles, so dived into the yawning pile of books that will someday topple down upon me and kill me in a way that any passing Canadian songstress might deem to be 'ironic' and surfaced with Befuddled by Cormorants by Frank Key of the quite ineffably existent Hooting Yard, which is both website and Resonance FM podcast.
I'd compare Mr. Key to Garrison Keillor if I'd ever heard any of the gentleman's work in order to make an educated judgement, unfortunately for this paragraph I haven't, so I won't. Probably best to leave this here and double return key to the next sentence, hi-ho Silver and away!
The charm of Hooting Yard is the way it fairly reeks of Englishness and delights in the flexibility of the language. Mr. Key never resorts to one word where a dozen will do and some stories, not those contained in this volume alas, are little more than brief set-ups for massive lists of things, places and people, or a mix of all three. If Lewis Carroll and Doctor Seuss had a lovechild then surely The Sun would have shown us a picture by now? And that child might look like Mr. Key.
Befuddled by Cormorants, 'a treasury of bedtime tales for pallid and sickly infants', are fifty-two stories that are a fair sampling of Mr. Key's oeuvre. Unless that means egg. These are of no more than a couple of pages each that start and, if you are lucky, reach their end without wandering down a cul-de-sac and leaving you trapped in a literary Pratts Bottom. We meet some of Mr Key's redoubtable creations, Tiny Enid, the heroic toddler with the club foot, Dobson, the singular colossus of the twentieth century who's many pamphlets would have made the world a much better place if only any of them were still in print and Marigold Chu, the mysterious woman whose relationship with Dobson we can never quite pin down, Boswell or Bruni? We find out 'How I Plunged into the Bottomless Viper-Pit of Gaar' and 'How to Eat Mashed Potatoes Next to a Lighthouse' and 'What to do on a Winter's Day in Tantarabim', but we don't quite get to the bottom of why Dobson didn't like squirrels or the best way to deworm your goat, but you can't have everything.
This collection is possibly anchored at 'chucklesome and amusing' rather than 'hernia-inducing hysterical' but is in that tradition of Spike Milligan and The Goons, Ripping Yarns and The Meaning of Liff. In another universe Ben Elton writes plays based on the work of Mr. Key and they are vomit-inducingly awful but allow him to go on the Graham Norton show. I don't know who has the better time of things.
I'd compare Mr. Key to Garrison Keillor if I'd ever heard any of the gentleman's work in order to make an educated judgement, unfortunately for this paragraph I haven't, so I won't. Probably best to leave this here and double return key to the next sentence, hi-ho Silver and away!
The charm of Hooting Yard is the way it fairly reeks of Englishness and delights in the flexibility of the language. Mr. Key never resorts to one word where a dozen will do and some stories, not those contained in this volume alas, are little more than brief set-ups for massive lists of things, places and people, or a mix of all three. If Lewis Carroll and Doctor Seuss had a lovechild then surely The Sun would have shown us a picture by now? And that child might look like Mr. Key.
Befuddled by Cormorants, 'a treasury of bedtime tales for pallid and sickly infants', are fifty-two stories that are a fair sampling of Mr. Key's oeuvre. Unless that means egg. These are of no more than a couple of pages each that start and, if you are lucky, reach their end without wandering down a cul-de-sac and leaving you trapped in a literary Pratts Bottom. We meet some of Mr Key's redoubtable creations, Tiny Enid, the heroic toddler with the club foot, Dobson, the singular colossus of the twentieth century who's many pamphlets would have made the world a much better place if only any of them were still in print and Marigold Chu, the mysterious woman whose relationship with Dobson we can never quite pin down, Boswell or Bruni? We find out 'How I Plunged into the Bottomless Viper-Pit of Gaar' and 'How to Eat Mashed Potatoes Next to a Lighthouse' and 'What to do on a Winter's Day in Tantarabim', but we don't quite get to the bottom of why Dobson didn't like squirrels or the best way to deworm your goat, but you can't have everything.
This collection is possibly anchored at 'chucklesome and amusing' rather than 'hernia-inducing hysterical' but is in that tradition of Spike Milligan and The Goons, Ripping Yarns and The Meaning of Liff. In another universe Ben Elton writes plays based on the work of Mr. Key and they are vomit-inducingly awful but allow him to go on the Graham Norton show. I don't know who has the better time of things.