Customer Reviews

Voyage To the End of the Room: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

Oceane is a former erotic dancer turned successful computer graphics designer who now never leaves home. We follow her strange routine through her London flat and relive her days in a Barcelona sex club. Later, as our heroine seeks her former lover, we follow her personal assistant, Audley, who is a former mercenary and now proprietor of the Dun Waitin Credit Agency.

If the premise seems thin, it's because this is a book in which the language and the interaction between characters takes precedence over matters of plot. The result is a eccentric, often funny read, as the progression of events becomes somewhat hard to follow.

A good work of fiction has nuggets of truth interspersed within it. At the very least, the reader can accept the nugget as truth, which, in a book such as this, provide the opposite of comic relief and keep the book closer to the ground. Fischer writes of Oceane's short encounter with a man with whom there is no possibility of a long-term relationship:

Juan was far too good-looking for any hope of a long-term relationship . . . Juan was perhaps to easy-going for me. It's like training dogs. You want the dog to obey you, but you can't have any real respect for a dog that always obeys you. You want a dog that occasionally goes over the wall or bites the postman without your permission; you want to be reminded that you command a subdued yet wild animal, not a crawler. A man should be strong enough to kill you with his bare hands.

Until the last sentence, the above passage captures a truth about male-female relationships that is hard to toss aside. While extending the often-used metaphor of training a man as one would a dog, Fischer takes a healthy stab at identifying the intangible qualities of a relationship that elude so many of us. Moments like this kept me turning the pages.

To be sure, this novel is not for everyone. It's a quirky, offbeat and meandering delivery, whose subject matter alone will alienate some readers. But it's fun reading from this award-winning British author.

"Voyage To The End Of The Room" is Tibor Fischer's funniest, sharpest, most incisive book to date. Read it and laugh yourself stupid.

The author's flailing attempt at globetrotting hipness (with the twist of the protagonist barely leaving her couch) falls flat. The occasional wittiness and humor in parts saved this book from a one star rating. It is indeed very funny in parts, but most of it I yawned through. And the ending... it just sortof ends.

This novel is written in first person by a young woman, but reads so exactly like a male fantasy of what a young woman's life might be like that it was impossible to believe any of the the characters. Many male writers climb into women's skin just fine; in this book basic female perception is nonexistent. I gather the writer was getting a kick out of imagining he was a beautiful stripper, with the proverbial heart of gold; but the book read like nothing much more than an unimaginative male fantasy.

Dissapointingly shallow, and tedious in its attempts at globetrotting hipness.

Along a similar vein, I recently read London Irish, young groovies in London, which was absolutely hilarious.

I bought this book on amazon.co.uk because "people who ordered x, also ordered Voyage to the End of the Room". It was a whim. Thanks for the suggestion, that's all I can say! I loved it. It was an earthy stroll through a very real character's musings on life, love and 20th century living; yet it never once left the realm of: "yeah, I can see how that would happen, or I can see how you would think that".

I highly recommend it.

This is a very funny book. It's also the first great novel about the internet.

It's as funny as Fisher's first novel "Under The Frog" and as strange as "The Collector's Collector", which was narrated by an ancient Sumerian bowl.

I love London, but reading "Voyage" I'd guess Fisher is thinking about living somewhere else. Oceane, his heroine, lives in London but never goes out; instead she lives her life from inside the flat, by going online and other tricks.

That could make a for a dull novel, but inspite of the fact Oceane never goes out we get a sex club in Barcelona and the start of the war in Yugoslavia.

Audley, Oceane's sidekick, who has to do the travelling and the dangerous work for her, deserves a novel of his own. More, please. Next time I visit England I'm going to Sunk Island.

The real mark of intelligence is humour. Anyone can be serious, but this is a seriously funny book.