The Song of Percival Peacock [Paperback]

Russell Edson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Poet and novelist Edson ( Tick-Tock ) has a considerable cult following, but this slight novel won't add to his reputation. Presented entirely in dialogue, this work is a deadpan comic fable of inheritance, class, misunderstanding and sex. Percival Peacock has come to claim his inheritance after the death of an elder Peacock who may have been his uncle, only to find one of the family chairs missing and some of the servants extremely obstreperous. Percival is quickly inveigled into a seemingly endless series of confusions of identity and gender, and finds himself marrying a next-door neighbor in a ceremony in which the entire cast of characters--including the Captain of Police, called in regarding the missing chair--appears in white wedding gowns. Equal parts Stoppard, Rabelais and the Three Stooges, this work veers wildly between clever wordplay and pointless repetition. Too much of the first half of the book is taken up with people accusing one another of shouting while speaking at the tops of their lungs. Despite flashes of Edson's considerable wit, this obsessively scatological tale rapidly grows wearisome.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This short novel by poet and experimental stylist Edson ( The Clam Theater , LJ 5/15/73; The Falling Sickness , LJ 4/1/75) takes absurdist fiction to the point of absurdity. Percival Peacock has arrived at the estate he believes he has inherited and discovers from the Maid and Caretaker that one of the 137 chairs is missing. The "story" is an annoying verbal bastinado involving Peacock's search for the missing chair. Each section of the book opens with someone standing "in the doorway," and every line of the dialog is screamed, yelled, shouted, or cried. The elderly Maid and the seedy Caretaker wish to be called Peacock's parents, although she speaks incessantly of her "figure" and he repeatedly tries to fondle the new master. The characters variously address Peacock as Kneesock, Peafowl, Ticktock, Wetrock, Pee-pee-cock, or worse. As the plot devolves, Peacock and the Caretaker don wedding gowns upon the "birth" of a piglet by Mrs. Yellington, the neighbor whose dwarf son claims to be the true heir. The lost chair, we discover, was the elder Peacock's potty chair and has since been used as a clotheshorse and subjected to repeated sexual assault by the Caretaker. Here, Edson's imagination far outstrips his execution. Not recommended.
- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc . , Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 125 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press; First edition. edition (July 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566890020
• ISBN-13: 978-1566890021
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,075,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

For decades, Russell Edson has been producing a body of work unique in perspective and singular in approach.  His books include The Very Thing That Happens (New Directions, 1964); The Childhood of an Equestrian (Harper & Row, 1973); The Falling Sickness,

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Edson's stab at novel-length absurdity, August 27, 2006

By 

Mr. Richard K. Weems "emperor_weems" (Fair Lawn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Song of Percival Peacock (Paperback)

Russell Edson is his own writer, to be sure. Probably the only creature that comes anywhere close to doing what he does is James Tate, who provides an insightful blurb on the back of this book about the ability of Edson to create characters in a repetitive purgatory, which is probably one of the best ways to introduce a primary Edson theme. Edson's characters often have to deal with highly absurd situations which they can live with or rail against--giving birth to frogs through their ears, having to eat ape for dinner every night, studying sheep in test tubes, and other such matters.

The basic situation of _The Song of Percival Peacock_ does not seem so absurd at first: Percival Peacock, nephew to the late Lord Peacock, has inherited the estate and so arrives only to find that a chair is missing from the inventory. In looking for the missing chair, though, the absurdity of things immediately start presenting themselves: the maid, for example, a sumo-shaped elderly woman who has an unusual treatment for rheumatism involving mayonnaise, was the object of lust for the late Peacock until the chair she put her things on when undressing superseded her for the Lord's undulations. The servants do not consider themselves servants at all but masters of the household, when not being told what to do by the actual Peacock air, who is a dwarf who seems to lurk somewhere in the basement. That this whole novel, just like many of Edson's poems, occurs solely in dialogue doesn't help matters as we have accidental sexual liaisons, fetishes and superficiality in its most extreme.

Despite Tate's assessment of Edson's characters suffering in a repetitive purgatory, some trains of dialogue become a little too redundant in the course of the 144 pages of this book. Percival himself is perhaps a little too blue blood at times, insisting on proper etiquette too often to sustain the strings of dialogue, though I will admit that his transparency at the beginning does help to set up the drastic changes he takes on later. But there are a lot of pleasures one can take here that can also be taken in Edson's poetic works--a very unstable sense of where things should be, and the constantly changing relationships that make his work very dream-like, where even absurdity has a home that we sympathize with or react to as we would the 'reality' of our waking lives.

Russell Edson met a severe challenge in pulling together a novel that could sustain the intensity of his much more brief poems. Though the work lags at times and doesn't constantly challenge, overall it is a fine attempt and presents many very memorable moments.

4.0 out of 5 stars this is why I like Russell Edson, January 8, 2001

By 

M "Loops" (Minneapolis) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Song of Percival Peacock (Paperback)

No one does quite what he does. The Song of Percival Peacock occupies the doorway between your cautious pretensions and your most hidden desires. Intriguing because it is character-driven, unique because it is written entirely in dialogue, this book is a sort of surreal funhouse.