Customer Reviews

A History of the Imagination

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Wow, I could not put this book down. Not since Kurt Vonnegut has an author provoked such imaginative thought out of me. Beautifully done, cant say enough good things about A History of the Imagination. Cant wait to indulge in his next work.

Lock does it again. This is his best work since "The House of Corrections!" I simply could not put this book down. Every line is a masterpiece, it's pure poetry in a novel form.

This "postmodern tale of adventure" is set in Africa, presumably of the 1920s. Norman Lock is a gifted writer, but this collection of vignettes is ultimately unsatisfying. The opening chapter, staring Prince Kong (later to become King Kong) is fairly typical. It is not so much a story as a bedroom farce, with the narrator competing with Prince Kong (and with Lenin) for the affections of Mrs. Willoughby. As a comedy the book is sometimes mildly amusing, but-like giant bucket of popcorn-ultimately too repetitive in style.
The writing is fairly typical of the kind of "postmodern" stuff coming out of Creative Writing programs these days. This book is a collection of brief vignettes populated by famous people-or at least their names are attached to a series of flat, empty characters. One gets the feeling that the book was composed by using those magnetic words that you can stick to a refrigerator in order to make weird sentences. Or perhaps the author clipped sentences out of a 1920s novel and then inserted the appropriately "postmodern" cliché. The characters are stick figures who are, themselves, generally the butt of the satire. I would say this book is "satiric" rather than "humorous" because there is very little humor in the story. Instead, this reader tends to cringe at each new episode. Ultimately you have to wonder what the point of this "postmodern" exercise is supposed to be. The stories are ultimately very forgettable. As much as you might admire the author's technical proficiency, the book has no heart.
It's worth comparing this novel with Tom Sharpe's Riotous Assembly (1971) a political satire set in Africa. Sharpe's novel is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Unlike A History of the Imagination, Sharpe's novel has an agenda: mocking the white regime in South Africa. Tom Sharpe's characters have an idea about what constitutes Right and Wrong, a necessary element in creating humorous scenes. The characters are usually mistaken in their moral views, at least from the point of view of most readers, and this is where the satire comes in. Norman Lock's characters, on the other hand, never rise above the level of trying to figure out whether or not it is appropriate to have sex with an unconscious woman. For this reason, his attempts at satire seem pointless and redundant.