The Wooden Sea

Jonathan Carroll has been writing novels a lot longer than Neil Gaiman, and is still producing confident, baffling little boxes of wonders and terrors like his latest: The Wooden Sea. Returning again to the setting of Kissing The Beehive and The Marriage Of Sticks, town Chief of Police Frannie McCabe buries an ugly old dog that comes back to life, meets a younger version of himself and goes to experience the last week of his life somewhere off in the future. They’re all clues in an elaborate riddle, clues he must decipher, and decipher quickly, if he’s to have a hope of saving the world, from what he doesn’t know, but there are those who want to stop him and those who want to help him, and it’s kind of hard to tell which is show more which.

If you read Jonathan Carroll, you’ll know what to expect, if you don’t: it’s well written, painfully human and profoundly mischievous. show less

This is a very hard book to explain other than to say it is so typical Jonathan Carroll. His books are part humor, part mystery, part magic. They contain many admirable quotes. With this book, I had to stop and write lots of them down.

The main character is police chief Frannie McCabe who is called upon to solve the mystery of a couple's disappearance. He finds that some odd things keep showing up in strange places over and over (a feather, a dog, etc.) McCabe lives with his second wife Magda and her teenage daughter Pauline. The cast of characters then turn to the more bizarre. I'll leave the discovery of who they are up to you when you read the book. The end of this book touched me so much.

The author's ideas are wonderful. What I love show more about Carrol is that, after his story is told, he tells his readers (within the context of the story) the philosophical point he is trying to make. He wants to be sure his strange way of telling a story does not go over his reader's head. For that, I am grateful.

If you're new to this author...welcome to the wonderful and different world of Jonathan Caroll! show less

I'm not much into sci-fi, time travel, or any of that genre, but I had this book as part of a bookray from Bookcrossing, so felt obliged to read it and pass it along.

Wow. What a read. Frannie (I suppose Francis) McCabe is the police chief of a small town in the Hudson Valley, and strange things start happening as soon as he takes in a three-legged brindled pit-bull mix who proceeds to die in his office. A dog that won't stay buried. A feather no bird has ever grown. An old bone. And then Fran's an old man in Austria, and then he meets his young, bad-ass 17 year old rebellious self. And - and - and.

Underneath it all is a love of small-town life, the particulars of people in a community, the private workings of a marriage, the secrets of show more the universe, and a common-sense, self-aware narrator who is never so surprised that he can't include the reader in the scene.

Funny, profane, grave, joyful. How satisfying it all is. show less

This is one of the rare books that causes you to pause and ask yourself "What am I reading?" Not once, not twice, but a minimum of at least three times. The Wooden Sea is not a book for everyone; not even a book for most people.

Carroll's writing is utterly shameless. He writes for himself entirely, and what comes out is a set of characters incredibly well-defined. His setting, his characters, the surrealistic nature of his plot and universe itself all come off as incredibly reasonable. He bumps the cliché and then promptly subverts it - he nears a piece where a lesser writer would falter, and hurdles it with ease.

Jonathan Carroll, while not for everyone, seems to be for some people perfectly. I feel quite lucky to be among that crowd.

For me this lacks the naturalistic uncanniness of "The Land of Laughs" and is more like Wacky Wednesday on steroids. Weirdness is piled on top of weirdness as each chapter dives off the high-board into a different oneiric pool. There is a story here - or I guess more of a point than a story, about memory and the persistence of the self over time - but the technicolor goofiness of everything drowns it out. Time travel? Check. Aliens? Check. Zen koans? Check. Tancretic spredge? That too. What saves this novel from being annoying is Carroll's light-heartedness and obvious love for the suburban American setting. That and the fact that, mere wunderkammer though it may be, it is at least a diverting one.

Frannie McCabe is the police chief of a small town in New York state. His weird adventures begin after he takes in a pitiful homeless dog, which soon dies. Frannie ends up travelling in time and trying to figure out why a lot of weird things are happening to him in his normal, down-to-earth home town. A mysterious messenger tells him that he's got a week to figure out what's going on.

I found this book to be quite a bit of fun. Carroll seems to be winking at us, not taking the whole thing too too seriously. I like Frannie as a character, and the insights that he has seem to fit with who he is. Carroll's tone is light and his style very compatible with the story and its inhabitants. I'll look for more by him.

The Wooden Sea is a pleasureable read. Carroll does a remarkable job of weaving the surreal into an ordinary life without ever making the main character's reactions seem anything but natural. I'd never seen such magical realism outside of Latin literature, so it was interesting to see it here. At each stage another set of accepted rules was pulled out like a rug. My only regret is that the author tries to replace the rug at one point. Once you change the rules, you can't go back. You can't say "you can't change the nature of time" and then say "Oh, yes, well, I didn't really mean that, sure you can." He suffers a bit from Kauffman's struggle in Adaptation -- he didn't know how to wrap up the ends. In the end it was still an enjoyable show more book and I'll certainly look for other works by this author. show less