Laughing with Australian Samizdat

I enjoyed this book, but I won't tell you to rush out and buy it. If you tried to do so, you wouldn't succeed. In the '70s and '80s, dissident writers in the Soviet Union invented samizdat — "self publishing" — the distribution of manuscripts by means of technology, primarily photocopies. Horizontal Lightning is a sort of Australian samizdat. The text is, or at least could be, printed by a computer. The words are surrounded by graphics — a mix of photocopies and original colour prints — often stuck to reused bits of paper: parking tickets, government logging regulations and what have you. The whole is held together by a bit of white shoestring threaded through holes punched in the pages. Yes, this is a thoroughly environmentally friendly book in its production, and the same holds for its plot. If that sounds politically correct but boring, it's not. Simon Ellis has a nice sense of the absurd, and he's an incorrigible punster. For example, the king of a Third World country has his day ruined by "some foreign idiot in a suit [who] tried to sell him on the idea of a chain of combined fast food and psychiatric help. With the unlikely name of Kentucky Freud Chicken, it was supposed to cater for all of humanity's basic needs in one quick lunch-hour hit, and get them back into the production line for the afternoon shift." This is a book that produces giggles, chuckles and the occasional guffaw. The story revolves around the efforts of a group of direct actionist greenies to save a rainforest in the south-east Asian country of Sunraysia. The plot is only as far-fetched as is required for this sort of broad-brush satire, in the style of Douglas Adams or Ben Elton. Some of the characters border on stereotypes, but they are usually saved, or the novel is, by the author's ability to laugh at his own work as well as at the objects of the satire. That and the word play: "Rays of twilight sliced through the leaves like telepath wires." Nice one. To read Horizontal Lightning, send $5 for postage, a contribution for the author and a sincere promise to return the book when you're finished to: Marty Branagan, Garden of Eden, Garden of Eden Road, Tomewin via Murwillumbah NSW 2484.

From GLW issue 208