Leeram in Fordlandia
by Buell Hollister
Reviewed by Alice Weiss
At the center of Buell Hollister’s
novel, Leeram in Fordlandia, is a dies ex machine in
the form of an Amazonian shrunken head that comes into the hands of
its possessor, a middle-aged ne’er do well Brookline resident,
Gilbert Greenbush, quite by chance and who manages to transform
Greenbush’s life of boredom, diffidence, and loneliness, into one
of adventure, confidence, and geniality, even romance. The way
through to these appealing transformations is a kind of reverse fairy
tale, where our hero is taken into what would have been the wilds of
the Amazonian rain forest except the Ford Motor Company got there
first, and built many years before, what is now an abandoned rubber
plantation, where local workers were exploited and the environment
abused.
The narrator’s voice is first
person, slangy, cynical, even clueless. As the central character in
the story, though, he begins to discover that he can operate in a new
world. It is a dream we all have, at least I do, some fairy
god-person takes us someplace new which looks rather like the old
world we actually live in but we are transformed into capable
respected adults. Well that’s what happens to Greenbush. The trip
of the book, and I mean that in the broadest sense, is how Leeeram
maneuvers him into capability success, and maintains it for him. On
the way Greenbush discovers an appealing woman, Lisa, and a forceful
and competent friend of hers, Suxie, (deliberately not sexy I suppose
with underlying hints of sucky) a child of Amazonian immigrants, who
luckily steals the head, and begins them on the journey to resurrect
the town of Fordlandia, and everyone else in the nearby villages.
Ultimately included in the journey are human helpers, among them two
professors, knowledgeable about a special kind of crop which also
incidentally goes some way toward solving the problem of world
hunger and who also have useful connections to the U.S.Department of
Agriculture . My favorites are two researchers, Ben and Seth,
computer and biologically savvy, who ultimately figure out how to get
hook up a certain kind of jungle grass to batteries which literally
electrify Fordlandia and the surrounding villages and towns. The
technique is to use the electricity generated by an intervention in
the process of photosynthesis. It seems to me a delightful answer to
obtaining power from a renewable resource, our lawns.
The engine of all this is a interface
with the afterlife provided by Leeram who it turns out is not just a
genie. Instead he has a muscular connection to an afterlife so vast
that it contains everybody he needs to see. One would have to go
back to the Greeks to imagine an afterlife so afflicted with the sins
and pressures of this world. Two of the interesting “wormholes”
into that source of consultancy, are the grave of Suxie’s
grandfather who returns with an understanding of the powers of jungle
flora, as well as live memories of the Ford plant operations. Which
leads me to my favorite part of the book. Henry Ford comes back as a
river dolphin, and more remarkably, a liberal. He has to be keep in
a water cage in order to, well stay alive and advise the often
hapless but well meaning missionaries of capitalism, that people this
book. With its unexpected discoveries and sometimes hilarious
solutions, this book is a romp.
No comments:
Post a Comment