Just finished Pandora in the Congo by Abert Pinol, translated from the Catalan; quite a peculiar mash-up of genres. Looked at from a distance, as it were, it's a meta-meta-fiction - a ripping tale inside a prisoner's plaint inside a courtroom case in GB circa WWI as told to a ghostwriter's ghostwriter. But - mostly it's a sendup of the white mans burden genre of African adventure. The prisoner, Marcus Garvey, has washed back up on British shores - the sole survivor of a disastrous expedition into the Congo led by two wastrel scions of Brit. aristocracy, planning to recoup all their prior failures through the mineral wealth of the Congo. He's jailed for suspected murder of the brothers for the two enormous diamonds that are all that he's had upon his return.
The expedition turns immediately into a horror story as the brothers treat one and all w/ a malicious abandon, marching into the heart beyond the heart of darkness. For not only do they find gold - they find humanoid aliens - who initially appear as white natives but who turn into ever more effective opponents. Of course a love story emerges - Marcus and an alien lady fall for each other, to the disgust of the brothers. Battles and batterings occur. And, most of all, stories under, through and within stories emerge.

If you are willing to totally suspend belief (and ignore errors of fact - as ripping yarns were wont to do) there IS an oddly exciting adventure story here (translated from the Catalan) that bogs down a bit every now and again in its own cleverness and perverseness. But - hey - despite knowing the tricksy nature of the beast in advance, i still got well taken in. So, that's good - I think.
3.5 stars - if you like this sort of thing. ( )

I received this as part of the early reviewers programme but I'm afraid I didn't get on well with it. The story gets very weird, which would not be a problem - I like weird - but I also found it rather sordid and the depictions of the Englishmen a bit heavy handed. When it came down to it, the story didn't interest me enough to keep going and the writing seemed a bit clumsy. Looking at the other reviews I am obviously in a minority, so maybe I will go back to it at some point and give it another try. ( )

I got this book as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer programme, and probably wouldn't have picked it up if I'd simply seen it in the bookshop. But the description in the ER programme intrigued me, and I'm glad I read it.

It's a multi-layered pastiche and parody of the old pulp African adventure stories, with two interlocking stories set early in the twentieth century, narrated by one of the protagonists as an old man late in the twentieth century. As the novel opens the narrator, Tommy Thomson, is scraping a living as a young man by ghost writing pulp adventure stories. He's frustrated by the need to pander to the extreme racism and disregard for facts of the pulp market. He loses the ghost writing job, but is offered the chance to write a true African adventure story -- ghost-writing the story of a man who is awaiting trial for the murder of his two employers on a gold-hunting expedition in the Congo.

Tommy is drawn ever deeper into Marcus Garvey's story. It's very like the pulp adventures he's written before, but with one twist -- this time it's a tale of brutal and amoral English aristocrats abusing first the black Africans and then a strange race of underground people, white but not entirely human, with a low-class servant who is the flawed hero. This tale of derring-do is interwoven with the story of Tommy's own life over the course of the years he writes Garvey's story, interrupted by his service in the First World War. Tommy thinks of his own life as boring and humdrum, but it's an enchanting read with some fascinating secondary characters.

There are multiple levels of unreliable narration, so things aren't quite as they seem. Part of the game is deciding who is unreliable and how far, and the author plays fair in the end. In the meantime you get a cracking read, with a lot of homages to other works.

I enjoyed the book a great deal, but I did have some minor problems with it. There are a lot of anachronisms, a couple of which threw me out of the story (in particular, singing "God save the Queen" in court at a time when a King was on the throne). These felt like mistakes by the author rather than being deliberate. One of the signals that part of the story is unreliable simply doesn't work if you're used to reading science fiction or magic realism. If you're an sf fan, switch into mainstream reading protocols when you're reading this book. And be warned that there is some gruesome imagery which might be a bit much for some readers.

One particular point -- this is a translation of a novel written in Catalan. Translations vary a lot in quality and can sometimes feel stiff and lifeless, but this one is excellent. It flows very well and is a joy to read.

Enormous fun, and well worth the time. ( )

Started reading this last night - what an amusing first chapter! Really looking forward to the rest now.

It lived up to its promise!

Full review at: http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2008... ( )

I have enormously mixed feelings about this novel.

On the one hand, it was a cracking, twisting parody and adventure, with nicely interlocking stories and tricky levels of doubt, but on the other it was frequently heavy-handed and fell into many of the same potholes, plot-holes, and attitudes as the works the author and the writer in the novel was exploring and mocking.

There were errors that became intensely irritating (singing "God Save the Queen" in an era when there was a King, for example) which intrude so far as to pull your mind entirely out of the grasp of the story, and too many clumsy moments in general. But it was also funny, engaging, and deeply creepy, though perhaps not enough to lift free and clear into success. ( )