Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins The book begins: The beet is the most intense of vegetables. It riffs off that in a short prologue, "Today's Special" promising a magical, sensuous and sensory-laden book. The prose is lush without being purple. It's full of puns, world play, off-"beet" humor, over-the-top metaphors, raunchy sexuality and a melange of thought-provoking ideas, weaving four narrative strands in a exuberant omniscient narrative. Three of those strands are set in the present day. There's Priscilla in Seattle, a waitress who spends her spare time in her home chemistry laboratory trying to recreate a very special perfume. In New Orleans Lily Devalier and her assistant V'Lu Jackson are trying to perfect a jasmine scent. In Paris cousins Claude and Marcel LeFever are the brains and the nose of a commercial perfume business. All of them are receiving mysterious gifts of beet plants. Then we move to tenth century Bohemia where we meet King Alobar--a man with two dreams--to overcome death, and to be the most complete individual possible. He will eventually travel east and meet his Indian wife Kudra and together they'd seek immortality among holy Tibetan lamas and with the Great God Pan. Over the course of the book these four strands come together and we understand how they're connected. Among other things they're connected by the world of perfume, scent. I couldn't help but be reminded of Patrick Suskind's Perfume where the art of perfumery is also central and which also inhabits that territory between magical realism and fantasy. Except Jitterbug Perfume is the opposite in feel--light, not dark. Fantasy--but not horror. And dealing with love and the search for immortality, not dealing with a monstrous serial killer. So, so far, so good. Except about half way through, around page 150, an anvil came whizzing by me and came near to concussing me. An Anti-reason, Anti-science, Spirit-of-the-Sixties, Pantheistic, Partisan-politics shaped anvil I could hear clanking against the rocks the rest of the way down. By page 250, I was skimming--and skimming rather than stopping only because I still wanted to know what happened to Alobar and Kudra. You know, I've managed to love books that had pretty heavy polemics, such as books by Ayn Rand, CS Lewis, Dante Alighieri, Philip Pullman... But say what you will about those authors, at least they fly their ideological flags high pretty much from the beginning. I think I got so annoyed because here in the first half I was having so much fun with a Story and then kerplunk Message. Also? Wiggs "Marty-Stu-Old-Men-Do-It-Better" Dannyboy? Most annoying character ever. At least to me. I have a friend whose literary tastes I respect who counts this book a favorite. I certainly think it's a book worth trying. My rating of three stars doesn't indicate a middle of the road reaction to the book. It's rated that way because I was absolutely adoring this book until half-way through--but then... So this is an average of five stars for the first part (Amazing!) and one star for the second half (Didn't Like It).