Chapter Three:
"Terror (...) often arises from a pervasive sense
BEYOND LAUGHS
of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking."
- Stephen King
La-de-da-de-da - I was waltzing on over to Anna's one night, a little earlier than I'd told her I'd come. Saxony was due back [from the hospital] in a couple of days, but I still wasn't going to worry about that until the time came. I got to within a house of Anna's when I saw her porch light go on and the front door open. She came out with Richard Lee. They were laughing and she had her hand on his shoulder. He was facing away from her, but at the last minute he turned around and took her in his arms. They kissed right under the light. It went on and on. (...) When they pulled apart, he put both hands on the front of her white blouse, and she laughed at something he said. She lifted one of his hands to her mouth and kissed it." (LL, p.155)Thus, the third part of The Land of Laughs begins with a disillusionment, with the first defeat. Thomas' reaction is understandable: "I dragged her to the bedroom and made love to her as if she were a tackling dummy. (...) I didn't know if I wanted to hurt her or screw her to death or what." (LL, p.156) Instead of causing him to stop meeting Anna, the jealousy and anger that the event stirred only boost his desire for her - but he will no longer dream of settling down in Galen, charmed as he is with its friendliness. The pride he derived from being Anna's lover gets undermined in more ways then one: as if having to share her affection with the disgusting creature that Richard is was not enough of a letdown, Thomas begins to speculate bitterly that Anna's intimate interest in him was a facade for lowlier motives: namely, that sex with her was "thrown in" as an incentive for him to work harder at the ever-important book he was writing.
More troubles come when Saxony arrives back from the hospital, still walking on crutches, and declares flat-out that she knows (her intuition again) about Thomas' affair. As his relationship with Saxony begins to deteriorate, Thomas, torn between the two women and dogged by guilt(30), tries hard to concentrate on his work. Writing France's biography is the last thing that remains satisfying, and gets even more so when Thomas learns the truth about Galen: France "believed that his biographer (...) could bring Father back to life if he wrote the story of Father's life the right way," explains Anna. Thomas, while incredulous, feels also immensely flattered:
'Anna, Jesus Christ, you're saying that's me? You're comparing pigs to swine! I mean pearls to swine! your father was...was...I don't know, God. Who the hell am I?'His role as "re-creator" or healer of their world makes Thomas everybody's friend in Galen. In the meantime, however, Anna demands that Saxony (an undesirable person in the town, as has been noticed before) should leave - or that if she does not, she will soon get sick and die, as decreed by France. Resigned, he finds an excuse to persuade his girlfriend to leave Galen, which she does: much to Thomas' despair, Saxony moves in with her old-time friend, Robert Altman, in the city of St. Louis. Unfortunately, her departure does not help Thomas in any way. The work goes painfully slowly, and Anna's favors are replaced by outright hostility when, to his and her consternation, with the arrival of winter things turn to worse for the Galeners yet again and the disintegration of their ordered world, decelerated since Thomas began writing, resumes its ever-increasing pace. There was an "unscheduled" road accident, and a woman gave birth to a baby boy, who was supposed to be a baby girl and who, to make matters worse, changed into a... bull-terrier dog.(31) Explains Richard:'Do you know why I've let you go this far, Thomas?'
'I don't know if I want to know. All right, all right, how come?'
'Because you have the first quality that Father said was necessary: you are obsessed with him. All you ever do is talk about how important his books are to you. (...) You don't know this, but since you wrote the first chapter, everything has gone right again in Galen. Things that he wrote to happen in the journals have happened, just as before.' (...)
I looked at her and opened my mouth to speak, but there wasn't anything to say. I had just been paid the most outrageous compliment of my life. My mind was stuck in an elevator halfway between green-bile fear and total, life-hugging elation. For God's sake, what if she was right?' (LL, pp.190-1)
I'm not shitting you, Tom. All of a sudden all of Marshall's characters are beginning to run together. Not only aren't things going like they're supposed to in the journals, but now they're mixing up all together, changing back and forth. Look at the Collins kid. One minute it's a kid and the next it's a fucking dog! What the hell is a man supposed to do, huh? (...) Everybody's scared that they'll be next. What I want to know is when you're going to finish that goddamned book. (LL, p.219)At this point The Land of Laughs takes a really malignant turn, as the Galeners, scared for their lives, begin to threaten Thomas: "You just get that book done soon or we'll fuck you up like we did that other biographer." (LL, p.220)
If most of the horror-story allusions in The Land of Laughs are clearly ironical, sometimes even humorous, Carroll knows how to be atmospheric when all laughs are a thing of the past for Thomas and the novel seems to become lethally serious:
My eyes opened and I was wide-awake. I looked at the green glow of my watch and saw it was three-thirty in the morning. (...) The only sound was the frantic ticking of my watch and the wind blowing outside. Then there was something else. Outside. Outside in the wind and the blue-black night. I turned my head to the window. It was right there, its face and paws pressed up and squashed against the glass. Its body glowed like an unlit white candle.(32)Overwhelmed by terror and panic, Thomas decides to flee Galen sneakily, but in the morning, just as he is ready to leave, he receives a telephone call from Saxony: she has just returned to town. Sick to the point of fearing for her life, she is desperate to see him. They stay in Galen, and for the next couple of days, as Saxony takes to proofreading and tearing apart what Thomas has written, while she regains health, France's journals regain their "power" and things fall under control again. (Which only sounds so mechanical in the telling...)
On the day that Thomas completes the first part of his book (the one which, as Anna demanded, concludes in France's arrival in Galen), there is a feast to be organized by the townspeople. All of the Galeners are going to meet at the old train station (no passenger trains are stopping in Galen anymore), according to Anna, to commemorate the anniversary of their "father's" arrival. Thomas and Saxony are sternly told to stay home that night and not interfere with the proceedings; after the gathering at the station all Galeners will meet them at their house and a great party will be given to honor the guests. Unsuspecting of any mischief, they promise to comply, but the cowardly-adventurous Thomas cannot help his curiosity and, under cover of falling darkness, sneaks out to the station. The reader will have already guessed the rest: miracle or not, an old, picturesque steam train arrived, and although Thomas is only able to see the milling crowd from his hiding place, he realizes the unnerving truth: Marshall France has returned to Galen.
In a gangster movie manner, the Galeners had prepared themselves to get rid of the witnesses to their magic, no longer necessary now that "Father's home." Before Thomas manages to get back, a violent explosion shakes their house, burying Saxony's body among the debris. Thomas escapes from Galen but never feels safe, convinced that the Galeners will want to "get back at him." Although none of them can leave their town for longer than a week (they die if they do, France's powers do not extend that far), there is always Richard Lee to do the dirty job. The three pages' long Epilogue squeezes into a few paragraphs the three years' chase: from America to Canada, to Europe. Thomas uses rare moments of calmness to begin writing the biography of his father - just what he had never believed he would do, just what Saxony always knew he would... Never again will there be such an upbeat ending in a Jonathan Carroll's novel:
We waited for him in Zermatt and killed him on a small side street in the middle of the night.'Hey there, Richard!
'Tom, Tom Abbey! What do you say!'
He had a long corrugated knife that he was trying to hold close to his side. He smiled and looked around as he walked toward me, just in case any friends of mine happened to be nearby.
When Richard was five or six feet away, Pop stepped out of the pitch dark behind me and said lightly over my shoulder, 'Want me to hold your hat for you, kiddo?'
I screamed with laughter and shot right into the middle of Richard's sad, astonished face. (LL, p.241)
We have used the thorough analysis of the story line in The Land of Laughs to achieve two main purposes: to introduce the reader to what might be generally referred to as "the world" of Jonathan Carroll and to begin the investigation of its complex symbolic network.
As far as the description of this literary world goes, we have presented the kinds of characters that populate it, its structure (the well-defined stages of plot development), the rules that govern it, as well as its "nooks and crannies", little peculiarities which are responsible for the originality of Carroll's manner of writing. In Part Two of this guide, employing a much more synthetic approach, we will demonstrate how these elements, some of which are fully developed in The Land of Laughs and some present there in embryonic forms only, are developed, expanded and modified in Carroll's later novels and how, whatever evolution his writings undergo, it is always the same "world" that provides a setting for each new tale, the same world with the same ideas at its core. Knowing and understanding the "canon" which The Land of Laughs in fact embodies, seems essential for dealing with the later novels because what was so carefully created in the first one will not be explained again. Instead, most of the ideas that appear for the first time in The Land of Laughs will be taken as if for granted, providing a starting point to new stories and new considerations, until all of this carefully crafted world comes to be subverted, if not totally destroyed, in the novel After Silence. Moreover, besides the "structural-conceptual" constant, there is also a thematic coherence: while analyzing the novel we have tried to pinpoint the main ideas ("subjects"), all of which are going to reappear. However different their shapes will be, they will all stem from the seeds sown in the Land of Laughs. Sometimes quite literally seeds: certain themes were signaled in - and limited to - a single paragraph. In this and in later novels they flourish into dense outgrowths of meanings.
Yes, the meanings. The Land of Laughs, a thematically complex novel, resembles an essay much more than a thesis: while posing questions, linking events, stirring and juxtaposing diverse ideas, it does not attempt to answer, prove or conclude about any of them and no critical effort can reduce it to a single definite (much less: intended) meaning, or even a set of such. It remains a critic's task, of course, to find and identify at least some of the possible meanings in a work of art; the second purpose of so detailed an analysis was just that. We have located what in the introduction to this guide we called "places of intellectual interest" in the novel, the manifold hints (conveyed by general thematic content as well as by means of discreet clues) as to how the senses of The Land of Laughs might be construed. In the final pages of this chapter we will reconstruct them to offer a few plausible - but in no case final - interpretations.
It has already been demonstrated how the major theme of The Land of Laughs, suggested on different levels of complexity, appears to be art. It could be argued that in one way the novel is a celebration of this aspect of human activity: embodied in the person of Marshall France, art is the starting point of everything that happens there: it generated and lured the main character, Thomas Abbey, into the Land of Laughs. Perhaps the most striking assumption that the novel seems to make is that of the overwhelming power of art: it deeply affected Thomas' childhood, led him to choose his profession (he teaches English literature) and eventually obsessed him to a disastrous degree, causing him to abandon the sober world of reality for the dizzying world of imagination. This power, however, stops nowhere short of monstrosity which cannot escape our attention, even in so non-judgmental a novel as this. (The reader will remember how violent France's books appear to be and to what violence his "universe" needed to resort to for the sake of self-preservation.)
If we read The Land of Laughs as a quest which Thomas undertakes in search for "the truth about art," maybe for its deepest meaning, then such an effort, for all its romantic adventurousness, proves to be largely futile and, again, potentially disastrous for both sides. The world of art is essentially a self-contained world of fancy ("laughs"?) and any attempt to penetrate it must involve a (critic's?) rejection of the firm logic that guides us through our everyday lives.(33) In this respect, The Land of Laughs is self-conscious in very much a postmodern manner. Inquired by Thomas why her father changed his name from Martin Frank to Marshall France, Anna responds:
'When he was eight years old he made up this character named Marshall France. He was a combination of D'Artagnan, Beau Geste and The Virginian. He told me he refused to be called by any other name for years. (...) Whatever the reason, it's perfect for you, isn't it? He became one of his own characters, right? Very symbolic, Doctor.' She tapped her temple with a finger and told me that she would see me later.(34)This brings us somehow to the character of Marshall France - the artist - himself. Thomas comes up with a ready explanation for his reason to be so deeply concerned with France's writings, which also seems to be the novel's working definition of talent: "Because no one ever got that close to my world." He in turn tries to do the same in the reverse direction, as if by way of homage to France, trying to get as close as he can to his world, but that, unlike a child's susceptible psyche, is more than well-protected, much too private to be understood, let alone shared, by anybody else.(35)
As the originator of his world, the undisputed creator of his characters, Marshall France is obviously a God-like figure (and at the same time just as clearly reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein, which Thomas articulates at one point), and as such he enjoys a cult following. It is interesting to notice that, among all the familiar daily routines, one ingredient of the small-town community life appears to be left out: there is no church in Galen. Nobody is seen praying there or going to a service and we know of no Galener who is a priest there, though there is one Priest of Spiders, a character from one of France's stories. The idea becomes apparent as we realize that whenever the word "God" appears in the pages of the novel, it invariably refers to France himself. In this light, the cult of France's writing is nothing less but a fully-fledged religion for the Galeners, of which Anna is a high priestess, the townspeople - the practicing believers, Saxony - a follower with secular tendencies, Thomas a disciple, whose arduous devotion borders on sacrilege, and Richard Lee - the devil himself, whom Anna strives to control. There is even the sacred tome (the Journals, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us). This interpretation may well be extended beyond the imaginary world of the novel right onto our own spiritual considerations, with an emphasis on the free will that God allows his creatures to enjoy. In a passage yet unmentioned, we find a story of one of Galen's inhabitants who - in a truly American fashion, too - rebelled against her omnipotent God. To illustrate this issue we will now simply quote the self-explanatory passage, as its analysis would take significantly more space without offering more insight than Carroll's narration does itself:
'Susy Dagenais was a real pistol. She was one of those (...) who didn't want to know her fate? The whole time she lived here she hated being one of us. She said it made her feel like a freak in the circus and that one day she would leave because she didn't believe where she'd come from. You know all about that, don't you, Tom?(36) (...) She was a great gal - pretty, real smart. We all loved her around here, but there wasn't anything we could do to stop her. She packed a bag, got on the bus to New York, and was gone. Poor thing - she'd just been in New York a couple of days when she died.'Thomas' moral anger is righteous, but the final word belongs to the Galener he speaks with. Carroll justly doesn't try to resolve the dilemma but - in this author's opinion - enriched with this dimension, The Land of Laughs becomes a sadder and a wiser book.(37)'But Marshall was alive then. Why didn't he stop her? He could have done it if he wanted to.'
'Tom, Tom, you're not thinkin'. Yes, Marshall was alive, and sure he could have stopped her.'
'But he didn't!'
'No, he didn't. Think, Tom. Why do you think he didn't?'
'The only thing I can imagine was to show people that he meant what he said. He used her as a kind of hideous example. (...) He wrote the poor character so that from the beginning she didn't want to know, then he wrote that she would leave Galen and die in a week?'
'Nobody else has ever tried to leave since then, Tom. And she was happy - she thought she was getting away. She did get away.'
'But he wrote it that way! She had no choice!'
'She died doing what she wanted, Tom.' (LL, pp.213-4)
Another way of interpreting The Land of Laughs is as an exposition of the "father figure" problem. Although Thomas, the narrator of the story, is the most apparent "main character" in the novel, with Anna France as its "heroine," it may still be argued, as we did in the beginning of Chapter One that they are both only agents in the hands of their powerful fathers, whose shadows prompt nearly all their actions. Both Stephen Abbey and Marshall France had exerted tremendous influence on the lives of their children, influence so great as to become an inescapable, defining factor of their existence. Immediately we will notice how different the children's reaction to this ultimate parental control is. Thomas Abbey strenuously tries to avoid following his father's footsteps; being the son of a famous actor is the single greatest predicament of his life, which the very first paragraph of the novel makes clear. It is not insignificant that for a long time he used to take offense every time someone suggested that he write his father's biography: to him, this would mean further subordination to Stephen Abbey's life, while he is determined to at least ignore, if not defy this part of his own history. Rejecting it, he needs to find a new identity of his own - and the novel culminates in the ultimate failure of this search. If, having sustained great damage to his personal life, Thomas eventually emerges as the winner, it is only by returning to his natural roots, by coming to terms with his father's world and rejecting any external influence. The Land of Laughs provides enough characteristic detail to make this idea clear: having relied for most of his life on the safety (and delusion) of the Land of Laughs, he suddenly finds himself oppressed by it and seeks protection against the destructive threat in the world of his father's art. On the darkest of his Galen nights, just before he plans to escape from the town, he watches one of his father's movies on TV:
'Pop, what the hell am I going to do?' I closed my eyes as tightly as I could. The tears cut wet lines in my face that I felt when I put my hands up to cover it. 'Jesus God.' I squeezed the heels of my palms into my eyes and watched the perfect colored patterns explode outward. When the pressure began to hurt I took my eyes away and watched him through the last of the receding colors. He was in the back of the bakery now, climbing down steps of a trapdoor ladder. Right before his head disappeared, he stopped and took of his hat. The sound was off but I knew what he said. 'Watch my hat, Robert. I just got it for my birthday and she'll boil me in oil if I get it dirty!'No solace there. But solace will come when Thomas, having overcome his resentment, finds his true self in asserting his roots (writing the biography of his father) and the same symbolism returns in the final scene: "Want me to hold your hat for you, kiddo?" - asks Stephen Abbey, assisting his son in his act of revenge.'Fuck you! Fuck you, Father! Everything's always so good for you. Your fucking new hats and everybody loves you. You even get to die the right way. Fuck you!'(39)
On the other hand, Anna France's attitude to her father is an antithesis of Thomas' attitude to his. She consciously chooses to remain "locked" within Marshall France's world of imagination, embraced in its safety, cherishing its serene stability. It is only when this (mental) prison of choice falls prey to the processes of change and disintegration(40), only when her sanctuary begins to dissolve, that she is willing to accept help from outside; but not, as one might expect, help to assist her in facing the "real" world that she has so far refused to recognize, but only to recreate the dream-world of her father, outside of which she is not able to survive. After that is done, when the ruined castle has been rebuilt, all entrances to it are closed and padlocked again and Thomas, the accidental witness to her personal crisis, needs to be - literally or not - eliminated.
As virtually nothing is left "in the air" in The Land of Laughs, Carroll again offers background detail to support this interpretation. While studying in a New York college, Anna had a lasting romantic affair which ended with her boyfriend's tragic death.(41) Desperate and mourning, she fled back to Galen. To console her, France stopped writing children's books and began working on The Night Races into Anna, the novel in which his power was for the first time revealed. It might be argued then that all of the world which France did since that time create was supposed to provide a soothing shelter for his daughter's battered psyche - a shelter so effective that it essentially replaced the other (cruel) world outside, and from a temporary refuge became her terminal habitat.(42)
It has been stressed in this analysis that, in The Land of Laughs, Carroll refrains from judgmental comments, restricting himself to presentation. If there is a single exception to this rule, it may be found in a very prominent place in the novel: in the paragraph preceding the last, as Thomas Abbey finally finds freedom from his lifelong obsession. We will quote this passage here, shortly before we move to the next possible interpretation of the novel, as it is equally relevant to this and to the following reading:
It was so stupid to send Lee after me, but maybe it had a purpose. Maybe now that he's back, they're trying to purify Galen completely - no more real people, no more normals in Marshall France town. At least then Anna wouldn't have to fuck Lee anymore. Yes, and maybe even Anna will be next, who knows? Her father could recreate her, better than ever, the new Anna model. She would never age, never get sick. Maybe that's why they sent Richard - if anything happened to him, the master would just make another. (LL, p.241)
If we were to determine the hierarchy of the novel's themes by their order of appearance, the considerations of art would come third, after the problem of "father figure" and the one we are going to consider now: that of male-female relationship, love and sex. The very first scene of The Land of Laughs presents Thomas Abbey having a date with an attractive girl, who, to his despair, insists on asking gossipy questions about his father. The dawning romance is doomed, as the girl turns out not to be exactly Thomas' type:
'Would you like to see my masks?'The girl accepts the invitation, but it is just the collection of masks that Thomas shows off to her that severs whatever link of communication has been established, and Thomas fails in his seduction attempt:She giggled a giggle that sounded like water draining from a sink. Then she shook her finger in a no-no-naughty-boy! way.
'You don't mean your etchings, do you?'
I had hoped that she might be half-human, but this dirty little Betty Boop routine popped that balloon. Why couldn't a woman be marvelous for once? Not winky, not liberated, not vacuous... (LL, p.2)
'But they're just so creepy! How can you sleep in here with them? Don't they scare you?'This short scene very much sets the sensual mood which underlies the whole novel. For one thing, it showcases Thomas' dislike for (and ineptitude at dealing with) the "experienced" type of women, embodied later on in no one else but Anna France. For another, we find Thomas a shy/romantic, if passionate lover with one more important characteristic: naive as he may be about the real nature of Galen world, he is not at all innocent about the matters of sex. Taken by Anna for the midnight picnic, he wonders: "Was she saying here that she wanted me, or was she flirting and trying to see how far she could go before I made my move and she would have to shoot me down?" (LL, p.151) Self-conscious and, yes, insecure, he admits: "I am pretty inept at seducing women. (...) I never knew if (1) a woman wanted me or not, (2) if she did, how was I supposed to 'take her', (3)... It's not necessary, because I think the picture is pretty clear." (LL, p.151) It is not surprising then that the first woman he manages to establish a stable relationship with is the meek, shy and totally dependent on him, Saxony. However comfortable this romance may be though, it does not stand a chance when Thomas is tempted by much more attractive, liberated, even demonic Anna, who promises a very different sort of erotic adventure. (43) The desire he feels for Anna, stimulated mostly by her exotic remoteness, is overshadowed by awe and respect:'No more than you do, my dear.'
That was that. Five minutes later she was gone and I was putting some of the linseed oil on another mask. (LL, p.4)
My hand was shaking when I lifted it toward her. (...) Then I didn't know where it should go when it reached her, now that it was halfway there. Her knee, breast, arm? But it knew that it had to go to her face. (LL, p.151)Beautiful and seductive as Anna was, Thomas admits there were other reasons for his romance:
It was an incredible ego trip. Lovely, charming Anna France wanted me. The great-looking daughter of Marshall France wanted me, me, not the son of Stephen Abbey. That had happened more than once with other women - as soon as they knew who I was, it was like a switch being thrown in them: if I can't have the father, then why not the son? Do you know what it's like to screw someone who you know is not doing it with you but with someone you represent? (LL, p.153)This may well be one of the most perversely twisted passages in the novel. Thomas' bitterness is easy to understand, but the reader will notice that he in effect treats Anna just as he hated to be taken by his former lovers: as the "great-looking daughter of Marshall France." Yes, because, obsessed with France as he is, this is as close as he will ever get to his icon, this is the biggest "kick." Making love to Anna he essentially fulfills his dream of penetrating the Land of Laughs, concurrently paying homage to France and - and this is the point where this interpretation cross-links with the "artistic/religious" one - committing a sacrilege.
The distinction between the earthy Saxony and the glamorous Anna is paralleled by a similar one between Thomas, an intellectual and tender lover, and Richard, who is primarily carnal. Interestingly, sex seems to be the last and only link with the "real" world that Anna maintains, as if it were the sole component that her father's world could not provide (although all of the Galeners can lead normal sexual lives: Richard's wife and children were "written" by France, as everybody else in Galen except for himself and his daughter).
With all her charm and devotion, Anna France appears to be a calculating woman - at least this is how Thomas tries to rationalize her affair with Richard:
I had a sneaking suspicion now. Suppose Richard had gotten bored with living in Galen. Since Anna and he were the only two 'normals' in the town, how could she keep him there? Simple: go to bed with him. Never in his wildest imaginings would a guy like him have thought (or hoped!) of having someone like Anna France. So, so long as she kept him hot and bothered and interested, he was hers. And Galen's.(44)Whether Anna maintained her romance with Richard because of desire or necessity, their relationship casts a dark shadow on the image of herself and that of the whole Land of Laughs, which Thomas can't help realizing. Consequently, killing Richard Lee he not only settles the score (and heals his hurt pride) but also "purifies" Galen himself: no base creature will defile his pristine image of Anna anymore. If she finds another lover, it will have to be someone from inside the Land of Laughs.
Before we go on to the last major theme that can be detected in The Land of Laughs, we will just draw the reader's attention to yet another one: that of the American small-town society, as opposed perhaps to the big-city culture (at one point Thomas discusses his mixed feelings about New York, the same place where Anna experienced the most traumatic moment of her life 45). There is perhaps only one but neatly suggestive paragraph that reveals this aspect of the novel and allows us to see Galen as a working model of "middle Middle America." Driving towards the city, Thomas and Saxony give a ride to a teenager from Galen. He is never seen again in the novel, but it's easy to remember the patches on the back pockets of his jeans:
One of them was a hand giving you the finger, the other was of a hand giving you the V-for-peace sign. Both patches were red, white and blue, and the fingers had stars all up and down them. (LL, p.53)It is hard to say anything about Galen society that has not already been said in another context, but perhaps the same observations can be transposed from the imaginary onto the real world: exclusive, hostile to change and intrusion, in fact, we might say, racist! The story of Susy Dagenais rings with new overtones now, too. It is not this authors knowledge that a typical middle-American small-town community be anything like that, nor can we assume that this is Carroll's intended vision, but it is a proposition that the novel yields.
We cannot leave the Land of Laughs without having dealt with the novel as a horror story - or more likely, a pastiche of one. This is in fact what it seems to be most self-conscious about, so replete with references to the genre books and movies, so ironical at times when it builds up and immediately ruins its "gothic" ambiance. To quote some of the more luxurious examples - "The moon was werewolf's delight" when Anna took Thomas on their midnight picnic; another time, facing the mean, cold and furious Anna France, Thomas remarks: "My head swiveled around on my neck like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist." (LL, p.116) As Anna ushers Thomas and Saxony into her house (the masks, the sinister cutlery, etc.), Thomas admits: "I do not like: horror movies, horror stories, nightmares, black things. I teach Poe only because I'm told to by my department chairman, and it takes me two weeks to get over The Telltale Heart every time I read it. Yes, I like masks and things that are different and fantastic, but enjoying the almost-real and fearing the monstrous are very different things. Remember, please, that I'm a coward." (LL, p.81) To make the irony complete, right after thoughts to this effect pass in his mind, Anna offers them drinks, but the choice is between Kahlua and Tia Maria, both coffee-black liquors! Thomas, who definitely is not your regular horror-story hero, delivers one of the best lines after he has met Richard Lee at the forest cottage, when he already begins to realize that there is more to Galen than meets the eye: "But I'll tell you something, Sax. I also think that there's some kind of big weirdness going on around here that I don't like much." (LL, p.105) This is the kind of comment one expects to hear watching a bleak, low-budget horror movie, amusing rather that frightening in its vigorous efforts to scare the audience.
Lastly, The Land of Laughs bears identifiable, but parodied, traits of a detective story, too. The mysterious death of Anna's New York boyfriend is one, the other - the unexplained disappearance of "the other biographer." But when Mrs. Fletcher assumes the role of a police constable, interrogating Thomas on the circumstances of the car accident he witnessed, the scene turns downright hilarious, given the nature of the questions she asks. The readers have to decide for themselves if these meanings are accidental, imposed on the story by the critic rather than inherently present there - we will only add that, after Saxony has left Galen for St. Louis, Thomas spends his lonely nights watching Streets of San Francisco and Charlie's Angels...
It is this writer's opinion that nothing is accidental in The Land of Laughs, just as there are no loose ends there. As the "aeroplane passage" demonstrates (where an innocent trace of condensation translates into a meaningful crack in the sky), practically every detail of the narrative fits ideally into the dense network of senses. Even the use of colors is not quite random. We have mentioned the red-and-white color which appears to suggest something malevolent (the railway crossing bars, the toy at the symbolic barbecue scene, Richard's packet of prophylactics - but also the plates from which Thomas and Anna eat scrambled eggs for breakfast at a roadhouse, after their first night of lovemaking 46). Then there is the green color, invariably associated with Marshall France: it is the color of the ink he used to write with, as well as the color of the dying boy's pistachio ice cream, the ice cream which is melting, in representation of France's vanishing powers. Similarly, the colors of the napkins Saxony used for their meals in Galen (see Chapter Three, footnote ) are indicative: "two green, two powder-blue, two brick-colored ones that she rotated constantly." Bluish and reddish are internationally acknowledged colors for male and female elements, respectively - and green is again associated with France: "rotated constantly" they form the ingredients of Thomas' and Saxony's relationship consolidated partly by sex and partly by their shared fascination with the Land of Laughs...
...The land which cannot be exhausted, but the exploration of which is enjoyable and maybe even worthwhile. Moving to subsequent novels we are not really leaving it yet. Whatever goes on in all of these books belongs to this sinister but alluring territory. Proceed, please.