Eighteen years ago, I was Ken Kesey's interpreter/guide on an expedition to the Great Pyramid. When we weren't poking around for mysteries in the Egyptian sands, I was hoping he'd tell stories about his Acid Test days in 1965 and 1966. Kesey, though, wanted to discuss Proust and Hemingway and Turgenev.
Big surprise. Of all the people who talked about the Death of the Novel in the '60s, he had seemed most in earnest. After all, this was the guy who'd written "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion." It meant something when a genuine major novelist declared he'd given up writing in favor of putting on LSD parties.
But by 1974 Kesey was talking about the novel again. This was heartening; did it mean he was actually going to write a third novel? Then the '70s passed, and the '80s, and he published nothing but essays, sketches, children's stories and one chapter of a collaborative novel.
At last we have a novel-sized book, titled "Sailor Song." You might call it an ecology tract in the form of a sci-fi story set in the future, or a memoir of what it's like to be a former media figure and youth guru. The further you get into it, the more it might strike you as a short story padded out four or five times its natural length. What it's not, unfortunately, is a novel to set beside "Cuckoo's Nest."
Here's the story: In a Greenhouse Effect future 30 to 50 years from now, Alaska has the same romantic allure that Hawaii had in the '50s. So a film crew comes to a pristine (though squalid) Alaskan fishing village to shoot a faux-Eskimo folk tale which is one of the 21st Century's most beloved children's stories.
It comes out that the film company also plans to develop a theme park in the village. The bourgeois pig film/theme park interests firebomb a newspaper that opposes the development, but the novel's hero, Ike Sallas (a formerly world-famous eco-terrorist who has read the great 19th- and 20th-Century novels and is described as a Greek god with Elvis Presley eyes), is unable to rouse the village masses against them. Then Sallas' trademark eco-graffiti reappear and somebody releases the film company's sea lions into the sea.
At this point we expect to see the masses rallying to the the sea lions' cause and casting out the developers, but nothing so obvious happens. Instead, an apocalyptic storm, which apparently has to do with a mysterious reversal of the earth's polarity (and smells of nitrous oxide: hmmm), wreaks vast havoc all over the world, in particular driving computers and clocks haywire and bleaching paints that aren't made from natural ingredients.
