Definitely a weird book. Has a lot of fantastic things and is half true to the first half of the subtitle “ A Tall Tale Too True”. It is a tall tale alright but too true? I doubt it.
In 1869 Mortingale Todd, a cavalry officer in US is on a scouting mission in Dakota to look for Sioux presence but secretly suspecting that he is being asked to collect data for corporate interests (mining for example) and not really (fully) government work. When he finds a strange man on a donkey in the midst of a herd of wild bisons, and when a greyhawk on his shoulder gets his hat back to that man, Todd is nonplussed. When the man conjures up a herd that seems to be entirely virtual, he is completely befuddled.
There is this funny scene where the man throws his blanket up in the air and that becomes a cloud on Todd’s head and pours down focussed rain, following him around wherever he goes to avoid it. He is then called by the stranger to ride on the backs of animals across a deep gorge.
The scene again shifts to an inventor called Hephaestus. He is a genius kid who understands languages and mechanics when he was just four. He outwits a group of thugs with his ingenious inventions strung out on the forest.
When he insults the city with inventions, they force this enterprising family out and coincidentally, the father’s brother wants them to go to Texas and they do. On the way, he befriends St Ives, a gambler with an iron prosthetic hand, who teaches him card games.
He meets with the magician again and learns that his glorious assistant is one of a twin. Both sisters are mute and besides, both married to him. When his dad lost his hard earned money the boy asks for employment with the magician. He also finds a librarian who lets him read rare volumes in his second hand bookshop. The bookshop owner finds out how extraordinary the boy is and takes him to meet the oldest lady in the world living in a secluded cave on a steamboat. She interestingly is called Mother Tongue.
She offers Lloyd a deal: separate from his parents (who will be looked after fabulously materially speaking) and become a guardian of all knowledge which is sought to be extinguished by powerful villains. She entrusts him with what seem to be glass eyes.
He, however, decides to decline the offer. And finds that his father has run away and while supporting the family with his flying machines, decides to build the biggest spectacle of all.
“Kite flying is mentioned in the Vedas and the Ramayana” says the author. Really? Never heard of either reference before!
When that goes spectacularly wrong, the dwarf brothers falling when the cage disengages and the chaos triggering a slave revolt and the biggest slave catching Lloyd as he crashes down, there is an utter chaos that is good to read.
They are sent away by the book shop owner in a ship to Texas, as they originally wanted to. The father reforms himself temporarily and is found and joins them. On the boat he meets Hattie who is black and changes her manners from the ghetto talk to a refined talk and seems to be a stowaway there. He gets very close to her and is sorry to part from here when he has to leave the boat. She is disfigured while a slave but has the heart of gold.
He gets to see a lot of clocks with music in the back room of where he is staying as a guest. One of them seems to have some evil magic and then he crashes into a secret meeting of the Quists and becomes a silent ally, showing them the rune box of the Martian brothers who have similar hieroglyph-like symbols on their box as the ancient barks sacred to Quists.
When the Quist guards he sets out with are attacked, the eye of Mother Tongue blinds them all and thus Lloyd earns credibility. When he describes that the ‘sacred texts’ Quists risked all to protect are fakes, then there is consternation.
Further, when Lloyd goes to protect a seemingly defenseless woman from thugs, he learns that she is Fast Fanny, amazing with guns. He also discovers that the people who provided space for him and his family were in fact automatons.
The ending is abrupt and unexpected but leaves a whole pile of things unexplained. It is weird enough to be interesting to read, the language flows smoothly but for all that, it leaves an odd feeling at the end of having read a widely fluctuating tale.
5/10
– – Krishna
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