The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm by Rhys Hughes
(Telios Publishing, 2023)
Reviewed by John Dodds
Writer, explorer, inventor, Perceval Pitthelm’s story in this short novel (or novella) begins on a writing retreat in the town of Figuera da Foz, Portugal. Though it is not his story we first hear, but rather the fantastical tale told by a man Perceval meets in the town, Old Rogerio.
To say the Old Rogerio’s tale—and the novel itself—is fanciful would be to do both a major disservice. When I posted on a science fiction group on Facebook that this was my current read, one commentator said it sounded “bonkers”, which pretty much sums up what I felt. Seriously bonkers. But in a really good way.
Rogerio tells how he helped to defend the region of Kionga in East Africa, on the border between German and Portuguese territories when the Germans, during World War I, tried to take it over. This was the region that became known as The Kionga Triangle. The area is relentlessly attacked by the German army, and trench warfare and disease are continuous presences.
The hostilities cease and Rogerio lives for a time in the town of Kionga, until, during WWII, the threat of invasion again arises. At this point, an Arabic inventor called Mustapha Mao-Tempo, who has been living there, comes up with what Baldrick in the Blackadder TV series would have called “a cunning plan” to escape what feels inevitable.
If you think about it, the solution was obvious. Attach a gigantic pair of robotic legs underneath the town and use them to hop the whole place to Portugal and to a life of liberty. Not a simple task, as you can imagine. But the plan succeeds, at least up to the point when the legs separate and the halves of the town head in different directions.
Of course, Hughes has considered rigid scientific principles for this kangaroolike apparatus. The town is partly held aloft by balloons and rotors so that it doesn’t just crash and fall apart when the robotic feet hit the ground after the first bounce. Clearly, the author wished to avert the criticism of analytical thinkers by creating a bouncing town using sound scientific principles.
What follows is a series of adventures, misadventures, subterfuge, a love story, spiritual quests, and more that address, as the tagline of the book’s cover says, “The absurdity of existence and the futility of human desire”.
We even find nods to other works. For example, in one section, Pitthelm is rescued from drowning by Quixote and his sidekick Pancho Sanza (yes, a deliberate spoonerism). Quixote believes Pitthelm to be a woman and names him Dulcinea. The pair are on their own mission to kill the evil squid mills under the sea with their spear-nosed submarine. I am not sure what Cervantes, author of Don Quixote would have thought of all this—not much, I suspect.
What we have here is a work of pulp fiction interwoven with surrealism, philosophical musings and general madness which is as irresistible as it is insane.
At the end of the book the author offers us a review by an unnamed critic who basically rips Pitthelm’s work to shreds, concluding about a found “wordy nightmare” of a novel manuscript as yet unpublished, “I await its sequel or sequels with burning indifference,” a comment that made me laugh out loud.
I had the privilege some years back of having a story of mine in the same anthology as one of Rhys’s stories, Breaking Windows: A Fantastic Metropolis Sampler so I already knew what an amazing writer he is.
In all this absurdity and mangled fantasy, which destroys any trope you could possibly think of, there is crisp, clear, engaging, and often funny writing that draws the reader in, wide-eyed, with a pull (or a mechanical-legged series of hops) that won’t let go.
Review from BSFA Review 21 - Download your copy here.