Preincarnateby Shaun Micallef, Hardie Grant, $29.95
He’s a funny man, is Shaun Micallef. And I mean that in the best way. His first novel turns out to be exceedingly funny too (in ways both ha-ha and odd) jumbling time travel and a murder mystery in with space ships, Tom Cruise and the Loch Ness monster.
With footnotes. Plus retro line drawings. And a running joke about badgers. It may sound too clever by half but really, it’s fabulously mad. The sort-of-plot is that likeable, ordinary Alexander Pruitt (“with the parched wit that made him the man to avoid at social gatherings”) is re-born 300 years earlier in someone else’s body and must race against time to stop his own murder. Put like that, it all seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? It’s those other plots about the nest of Masons and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the fate of the universe which can confuse.
What’s clear is that Micallef’s mind works in mysterious ways; happily, almost all of them evident in this novel.
I defy you to follow one single thread of logic The fate of the universe – and James 11’s hopes of being restored to the British throne – rest in the hands of just a dozen men, not counting Queen Victoria.
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