Book Review by Rakhi Dalal
Title: The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm
Author: Rhys Hughes
Publisher: Telos Publishing
The cover image of this book, depicting kangaroo like feet fitted to a patch of land and carrying homes, hopping through what it seems like a desert is as incredible an image as the story that the book proceeds to tell. At first glance one wonders what kind of imaginative world the author has invented and given life to in these pages and where is this thing hopping to and why.
It doesn’t help that the subtitle line reads “The Absurdity of Existence and The Futility of Human Desire”. For as the book begins, we are flung into the realms of a fantastical world swathed up in saudade and encountering bizarre events. Incidents triggered by the bittersweet longings of human heart, which makes the absurdity seem plausible amidst the ludicrous.
Such is the allure of the words crafted by Rhys Hughes. Nimbly, he makes use of the elements of the fantastic, comic and absurd in a highly imaginative setting while focusing on the human condition brought about by an intense yearning for something unattainable or saudade. An English writer of speculative fiction, much like the narrator of this book is, Hughes employs inconceivable ingredients, making this book a fun riot in every sense. Having written nearly fifty books, more than nine hundred short stories and innumerable articles, his style assumes certain effortlessness, turning the reading experience of this book into a marvellous excursion.
The book begins with Perceval Pitthelm, the narrator, arriving in Portugal in the quest of finding a quiet place to live and write. He rents a most peculiar house which arouses his curiosity to know about its history. His search leads him to the former owner old Rogerio, a seller of saudade, who goes on to tell him the tale of the house, originally situated in the town of Kionga in Africa and transported along with the town to Portugal on big hopping legs coursing a journey through the deserts. And thus begins the fantastical tale which not only captivates the narrator but also suffuses his heart with a passionate desire to taste saudade.
The events that succeed set in motion an adventure, taking us onto a journey through sea and desert, by boat employing huge hands, submarines battling giant squidmills and rafters sliding across desert. We witness cheek trees whose petals flush furiously and are accompanied by sweet and painful strains of Fado singing. We behold the play of a cheek tree guitar by giant Django hands and ripping open of Fado singer Cristina into a mist. We bump into a Don Quixote like Captain of the submarine followed by his own Pancho Sanza, on their mission to free the human existence from giant squidmills. We meet Mustapha, the inventor of hopping legs; a cast away on the desert who wishes to have a revenge on the world but instead finds love and goes onto find a quiet place to settle. Towards the end, our narrator, now free from saudade, is left with a bottle of song and the tale he is left with to recount.
The roller coaster of the ride that this book turns out to be is every bit delightful. In a subtle way, it does lead to contemplation upon the absurdity of human struggle to achieve the impossible whilst all that is needed is a little love and peace.
The book wraps up with a review of the works of Perceval Pitthelm by a reviewer who turns in a ruthless critique, a reviewer who is a large orange gargoyle with three eyes (invented of course by old Mustapha) and who has to write reviews for a living. This critique appears to be echoing Hughes’ own oeuvre of work and a quip on reviewers who put an eternal curse on the readers! A curse, if I may add, from which there is no respite for the readers who stand on the shore of his writing, intoxicated by the desire to delve into the unbelievable world conjured by him.
Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .
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