The Continent of Lies

The Continent of Lies deals with a futuristic society where entertainment has evolved to an extreme level. Rather than watch TV or movies, you simply eat a "cephapple" and experience the story as a dream into which you are inserted as the main character. The cephapple--also known as a dreambean--is like a real apple (without seeds), and Morrow provides many examples that run the gamut of genre and type. The central character, Quinjin, is a dreambean critic who comes across a bean so sinister that it has the potential to enslave humanity. He sets off on a quest to destroy the tree from which it sprang, along with his teenage daughter, his hedonistic "rich boy" friend, and his psychobiologist/dreamweaver girlfriend (not to mention a robot that longs to be a James Bond type secret agent). Like his other books, CoL is funny, clever, and fairly well-plotted. I was put off, however, by the extensive "sci-fi-ish" vocabulary early in the book, and I almost put it down around page thirty. In fact, if I hadn't been a fan of Morrow's other works (especially Towing Jehovah), I probably wouldn't have continued. Still, once I got absorped by the story, it was hard to put down, and there were enough twists and turns that I found I couldn't really predict what was going to happen. All in all, a worthwhile and fun read, if not as "thinky" as some of his other books.

Anyone who has caught up with James Morrow in the 90s, as I have, will want to check out this earlier work. This book shows the same skewed sense of humor he later put to more acclaimed effect in BIBLE STORIES FOR ADULTS and TOWING JEHOVAH. The story concerns Quinjin, a reviewer of dreambeans--sort of a virtual reality device you consume. Someone has created a dreambean so horrible that the dreamers get trapped in the fantasy world, including Quinjin's daughter.