But, after a few pages, even the best of jokes palls and leaves us with pages of desperate writing.įor many moons, Garrison Keillor has been broadcasting and writing about Lake Wobegon, a fictional town in Minnesota based, in part, on his hometown of Anoka. that Queen Victoria might hitch up her skirts and secretly hunt demons or Abraham Lincoln despatch vampires - easier because of the lack of skirts. Such humour as exists comes from the forced nature of the situations, e.g. Personally, I’m not impressed because although there’s some originality at a conceptual level, the execution is neither a good version of the original styles and manners, nor a competent supernatural novel. I’m also conscious that neither book would make much sense unless you were really familiar with the originals.Īll of which brings me to the modern fashion for mash-ups which has produced such classics as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith), Little Women and Werewolves (Porter Grand), etc. Such books are of their time and I seriously doubt anyone would find them even remotely amusing today. Similarly, I grabbed National Lampoon’s Doon by Ellis Weiner. In terms of my reading, I also enjoyed the parodies of the classics of my chosen genres, devouring Bored of the Rings by Henry N Beard and Douglas C Kenney as soon as it came out. This caught me at an impressionable age and I’ve never really lost a somewhat subversive view of the world. We had to focus on the text, capture its meaning and then make fun of it. If you want an academic justification, I suppose he must have encountered Heidegger’s ideas as incorporated into French existentialism because he gave us an early introduction to the process, courtesy of Derrida, we might now consider deconstruction or, if you prefer, reconstruction. Looking back, this was building on our devout worship of the surrealism of the Goon Show and other potentially satirical radio programmes of the period. Suddenly, we were expected to parody and lampoon anything and everything supposedly serious. All continued serenely until, after we’d polished off O-Levels, our English teacher decided we should explore the range of literary forms. We ground through the grammar of both English and foreign languages so that, when we acquired vocabulary, we could speak and write with formal exactness. Later, we could build on this for a more sophisticated level of performance. Educationally, they believed we first needed order and structure. Various talking heads would appear in front of us, doing their best to interest us in basic information. When I was at school, the atmosphere was mostly serious.

The twilight of lake woebegotten