Tom Robbins: Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

(Bantam)

$26.95

Review: Patrick Gower*

If you want to read about sex, drugs and shameless metaphors then Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is the book for you.

But don't bother with Tom Robbins' seventh novel if you aren't prepared to put up with 440 pages of preaching and pontificating as the 1970s throwback laments today's social evils.

The fierce invalid - and protagonist extraordinaire - is Switters, a rogue CIA agent who has a penchant for teenage girls and dope of any description. Despite his devotion to the seamy side of life, including a hankering for anything in a nun's outfit, he pretty much rocks.

Switters isn't really an invalid, but after an early adventure in the South American jungle - he's there to liberate his grandmother's pet parrot, Sailor - he is hexed by a voodoo spell that will kill him if he lets his feet touch the ground. So he spends the rest of the time rolling around in a wheelchair, or occasionally on stilts, roaming the world, trying to shake the curse.

After amazing and unreconcilable plot twists, he ends up in the Middle East with a convent of defrocked Catholic nuns who are trying to convince the Pope of the worth of contraception, to "wrest free from the women's shoulders the boa of spermatoza."

The loose ends, from Vatican brouhaha to Switters' torn heart, are eventually tied when his feet hit the ground.

Switters' untamed life endears him to the reader - how could you not love a man obsessed by Broadway tunes such as Send in the clowns? Send in the clowns, sure, but spare us the lectures. Enjoying Switters' dazzling and hilarious adventures comes at a cost - trawling through analogies more ambiguous (albeit a helluva lot funnier) than those in a cryptic crossword and being a captive audience as Robbins vents his spleen.

His whipping boys are consumerism, religion, sex, computers and all manner of social conventions. Readers will find their eyes glaze over as they battle with the tangled plot and suffocating diatribe.

If you can bring yourself to wade past the drivel and can read the book quickly enough to enjoy the humour for what it is - seriously warped - then there's plenty of fun to be had. But if you can't ... well, it's one of those books that will sit there, gathering dust. Not for the faint-hearted - or anyone with a short attention span.

* Patrick Gower is a Herald journalist.