Mar. 15th, 2008

book #18

Mar. 15th, 2008 03:27 pm
realthog: (Jim's bear pic)
I've been taking advantage of the free e-books offered by wowio.com to build up for myself an impressive library of (mainly ancillary) reading for my next biggish nonfiction book, Bogus Science. The other day, sinfully browsing beyond my supposed focus, I noticed among the new titles on offer one called The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun (2003), by Robert Kaplow; it is, of course, a parody of Ms Braun's long series of cosy feline detective stories, The Cat Who . . .

Well, ostensibly a parody, anyway -- as I would find out.

I read the first few pages of the downloaded e-book, giggled a couple of times, and decided I really must read the rest. I obviously didn't want to be stuck with having to read light entertainment -- well, garbage, to use our domestic patois -- at my desk, so I checked and discovered to my surprise that our diminutive local library had a copy on the shelf. The following morning, round there [livejournal.com profile] pds_lit and I went . . .

Well, the book's short. On reading the printed version I discovered that Kaplow basically gives up on directly parodying Braun about a syllable and a half after the point where I'd stopped reading the version on screen. Thereafter, he's riffing not so much on any theme of Braun's as on the theme he himself has created within his own first chapter. There are lots of jokes as the plot shambles aimlessly around, its author having seemingly forgotten that the first important element of successful parody is that the parody be as skilled in its genre as the object of the parody -- there's not really any pretence in The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun that we're being offered a solvable mystery novel, or even a mystery novel at all.

Most of the aforementioned lots of jokes are filthy. I'm not actually averse to ultra-smutty jokes, and might even have been responsible for one or two myself over the decades. (But no more than one or two, you understand; my daughter could be reading this.) The trouble with the book is that very few of the jokes in it, filthy or unfilthy, are actually very funny . . . but there are also lots of instances where Kaplow seems to think that, if the humour just won't come when he wants it to, straightforward filth is an adequate substitute for wit -- that we won't notice the difference. Anyone else recall falling around in hysterical laughter behind the school bicycle sheds? And, yes, Kaplow gives us fart jokes, too.

As an extension of the filth-is-funny delusion, there are several longish passages which are hard to distinguish from somewhat drably written soft porn. Again, I have no particular philosophical objection to written soft porn, but I do object to it when (a) it's not very well written and (b) I'd thought I was undertaking to read a piece of (hopefully) hilarious parody, not an attempted rauncherama.

What disappointed me the most about this book was the constant thought that Braun's series (of which I've read perhaps the first two, which I quite enjoyed in a silly way, and a much later entry, which I thought was pretty dire) is, as it were, ripe for the parodying. The modern book trade -- in which most of the movers and shakers have built their reputations through an outright refusal to read any of the commodities they sell -- regards parodies as exercises that can be performed only the once, with no consideration of their quality or lack of it entering the picture. ("Sorry, Mr Swift -- we had a flying-islands book last week.") Kaplow has made a, to be blunt, godawful fist of satirizing Braun's oeuvre, but almost certainly it'll be the only parody of the series ever published. So far as the book trade is concerned, "the Lilian Jackson Braun parody" has been done.

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