Voyage To The End Of The Room [BARGAIN PRICE] (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THIS IS how I became rich: I was at home at four-thirty on a Friday afternoon..." (more)
Key Phrases: diving lessons, dangerous lunatic, Real John, Kold Hard, Sunk Island (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A freelance designer's effort to collect a work debt turns into an unusual series of international adventures in Fischer's latest, a meandering, deadpan anti-epic with a fascinating female protagonist. Oceane is a former sex show performer turned designer, a brilliant, beautiful but reclusive woman who interacts with the world via an array of high-tech toys from her modern London apartment. As the novel begins, her comfortable existence is disturbed by a client who stiffs her on a bill and a letter from an old boyfriend named Walter who supposedly died a decade ago. To assist her in her quest to be paid and to find Walter, Oceane turns to Audley, the cheerfully sinister head of the Dun Waitin Debt Collection Agency. Audley, energetic and eager for unusual assignments, becomes Oceane's eyes and ears, toting devices that allow her to travel vicariously through him. As they set up this system, Oceane recalls life on the job at a sex club in Barcelona where she first met Walter, and Audley describes his failed attempt to sell his services as a mercenary in Zagreb. Finally, Audley travels to Micronesia to track down a missing letter from Walter. Fischer's episodic plotting will frustrate some readers, but his talents as a raconteur and a cynical observer of the absurd are considerable. Oceane's stoic eccentricity and her flair for the dramatic make her a worthy match for the fascinating cast of mostly male supporting characters, and her final realization-"the battle is always with yourself, but that doesn't preclude having an ally"-is curiously moving.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Those young Brits and their irremediable cleverness. Here's how bad it's gotten: I'm typing with my left hand while my right is gripped in my teeth. It keeps trying to escape and dart onto the keyboard, crabbing and fluttering its fingers from pure muscle memory. It wants to type something.

I'll explain. I'll set my hand free for a moment. Voyage to the End of the Room is a novel that:

Evokes Amis in the style of Martin with the Amis clearly influenced by following in the Amis of Martin bloody Amis help ow Amis . . .

Ouch. And that's how much of a problem it's becoming. Amis is a lodestar for British novelists of a certain age and aspiration, Tibor Fischer among them. Fischer debuted strongly with Under the Frog in 1993, securing a place on Granta's best-young-novelists list, as well as Booker Prize nominations and the celebrity (or at least notice) that attends on hot, young writers in the UK.

High hopes were upon him, and that's often hard. But his career since then has seemed a gripless slide into a certain mordant, gymnastic cleverness -- an art formed of microtuned phrases and adept set-pieces that seem to exist for their own sake, with the story and characters as mere delivery system. This comes from Amis, or rather from following too closely in the young-British cult of Amis, and it's been a dominant trend in British letters for a decade. As brilliant as Fischer is, Voyage to the End of the Room shows that things can't go on like that forever. It's a splat of clay scattered with gem chips -- or, one suspects, literally a collection of very acute ideas from a notebook that Fischer carries around, ideas that looked like they'd be good in a novel, whatever the next one eventually turned out to be about.

Oceane is a thirtyish graphic designer, accidentally rich, who grew estranged from the damp, intense, New Yorkish metropolis that contemporary London has become and decided to stay home and order in, since "London is deliverable." She never leaves her apartment building, even while traveling: A downstairs neighbor sells "vacations" in his own apartment by arranging for Oceane a perfect foreign experience -- such as an evening in Finland, with a dinner of plain fish and potatoes and a couch stocked with a melancholy drunk who tries to pick her up. Oceane gives observations, she ruminesces. That's a very Fischer word: He's a neologician; he balances sentences with cool alacrity; his timing is cadenced. We get small, deliciously direct treatises on the lines used by panhandlers, on how certain professions "have ready admittance. You are lying in bed one afternoon, unemployed, unskilled, unwashed in grotty bedding with no friends, no money and no prospects, and miraculously, by one tiny mental adjustment, you're no longer a zero-contributist, a failurist, you're a poet." And on many other things, and often deliciously. Then a flashback to years earlier, when Oceane lived and worked at a club in Barcelona, doing live sex shows, and the novel hangs there for an eternity. There's a string of unresolved deaths, including a character found crushed on a rooftop under a dead cow. A dead ex-boyfriend writes cryptic letters; another character goes to war in the former Yugoslavia.

And it's all brilliant, until you realize the plot has fallen apart completely, and that Fischer knows it too, yet keeps trying to apply duct tape in the form of another small treatise on human nature, on love, on war or party etiquette -- one more set piece, one more node of cleverness.

Because here's what he's doing: As Oceane tells of herself, of her life and its incongruities and toothsome ironies, with epigrammarian twist lines such as "Writhing about in ecstasy is harder work than you would credit," we keep hearing a voice in her that sounds like Fischer's -- and there are sudden moments in which a soul seems to appear on the page in all bareness, needing to speak from itself to you. (An unaccountable, jarring line from the cool, smooth-miened Oceane: "It's terrifying to think that one day the desire for [good food, music, a good chat] might vanish like the desire to go out. And then I'll have nothing to keep the terror away.") Soon every character has the same voice and is speaking from a similar standpoint, and you realize that Fischer is often writing as an essayist, in plain earnest, yet hiding behind the notion of the Amis-inspired "brilliant novel," with its flashy lines and seamless tone, as a security measure.

He keeps doing things like this: A passage bracketed by section breaks, hanging quite alone in the middle of the page and attributed to no character: "Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away." If Fischer didn't jot that on a napkin whilst alone at the pub, I'm mistaken. And there's nothing wrong with that, except with Fischer we've seen a career rise and (seemingly) fall in 10 years, packing books with ideas that would be the trove of most authors' lifetimes if they were used sparingly and well -- unpacked and explored rather than held up alone as bangles and sparklies as though to prove, "Here's an idea; this is clever. Here's another one. Isn't this something like you'd see in a brilliant novel? Yes? Well never mind that, here's another. . . . " If Fischer can come up with two or three good ones a year, rather than two or three dozen, he might still have a brilliant career to chart.

Reviewed by Gavin McNett

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 251 pages
• ISBN-10: 1582432988
• ASIN: B000I0RTOW
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,692,489 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dissapointing at best, January 8, 2004

By	James Stevens (Hartford, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voyage To the End of the Room: A Novel (Hardcover)

Tibor Fischer is known for his inventive narratives and his off-the-wall characters and situations. This book has neither. Instead, we get a dull story interspersed with "tall tales" that make little sense, aren't very interesting and ultimately distract the reader from the protagonist.

Having loved Tibor's previous efforts, I came away from Voyage to the End of the Room extremely dissapointed. This is a book that fails to stand out in any way and is more of a boring, Hollywood rendition of the subjects covered than anything else.

What was meant to be some sort of inciteful personal journey turns out to be a dull, meandering exploration of how a man would like to think a woman thinks and acts.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Really Big Review, December 13, 2004

By	Steelilack - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voyage To the End of the Room: A Novel (Hardcover)

The past works I've read by Tibor Fischer (The Thought Gang and The Collector Collector) have both been remarkable in their brilliance. Fischer writes with language that is multi-layered, quick-witted, and wonderfully fun to read. His mastery of the absurd and his stylized vignettes have made his books enjoyable for both long sittings in front of the fire, or a quick 10-minute jaunt while waiting for the train. Voyage to the End of the Room, tragically, does not measure up to his previous works.
This is not to say that is a bad book. It possesses a wide array of interesting language, and the situational comedy is still present in spades. The man who is crushed to death by a plummeting cow on the roof of a Barcelona sex club is a good example of this. It is a worthy exhibition of some of my favorite aspects of Fischer's writing. The reason for the aerial bovine is never explained, making it all the more entertaining.
The book also displays some very insightful observations and didactic. My favorite lies on page 204 of the paperback edition. "What I find significant is that no one seems to have Hope any more. One-off hopes exist. You hope the rain will stop, you hope you get the job, you hope you win the lottery, you hope you get to go out with someone attractive. But belief in the future seems to have no future any more." This illustrates some of the best qualities of Fischer's writing. A perceptive observation coupled with a subtle inclusion of humor. The last sentence also gives us a hint at Fischer's prowess with double meaning and wordplay.
The problems arise with the more conventional aspects of the book. The plot deals with a somewhat agoraphobic designer named Oceane. After receiving a letter from a former coworker, she hires Audley to travel to Micronesia for her and retrieve another letter from "an evil, dangerous lunatic" named Bruno. It also contains a lengthy flashback describing Oceane's employment in the aforementioned sex club. Overall, a plot that Fischer is completely capable of working with. It feels very fractured, however. The vignettes of The Collector Collector fit together with microscopic precision. Voyage to the End of the Room lacks this precision, and feels more like ill-fitting flagstone.
It also is somewhat harder to identify with the characters. Like him or not, Hubert from The Thought Gang was fairly easy to connect with. Both Audley and Oceane have very interesting premises behind their characters, and both are quite likable, however neither is fleshed out enough to allow the audience a strong connection.
This leaves a book that exists in a sort of void. Fischer's faithful readers will be somewhat put off by the change in style and quality, and the disappearance of The Thought Gang's lingual sorcery. Newcomers would be better off starting with a different book, allowing them a better taste of Fischer's style. Ultimately, the book deserves a four star rating and will add to, not detract from, Fischer's body of work, but will not be counted among his best work.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A disappointment at 5 stars, April 30, 2004

By	Jake006 "rjberry8" (The Couch) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voyage To the End of the Room: A Novel (Hardcover)

When I first realized Mr. Fischer had come out with a new work I got very excited. The high expectations I held for this book ultimately made this book a huge disappointment.

The plot is not tied together well, it seems more like a string of a short stories tied together through several characters loosely tied together. What Mr. Fischer is best at is providing rich detail and superb entertainment through tangential stories. However, in this book the balance is not quite right. Reminiscent of the big mac with a skewed bread to meat to cheese ratio. You need at least two more meat patties Ronald!

(But when McDonalds Francais offered the maxi-menu mega mac with 4 beef patties, it was just right. Thats a whole other story though.)

Another sad reality was the lack of vernaculous admonition that makes Mr. Fischer's work such a joy usually(whatever the heck that means).

Despite all these problems this book was still excellent and highly entertaining, considering short stories are what Mr. Fischer does best. A must read even.