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Summary
Summary
In 1938, two rival expeditions descend on an ancient temple recently discovered in the jungles of Honduras, one intending to shoot a huge Hollywood production on location there, the other to disassemble the temple and ship it back to New York. A seemingly endless stalemate ensues. Twenty years later, a rogue CIA agent sets out to exploit the temple for his own ends, unaware that it is a locus of conspiracies far grander than anyone could ever have guessed.
Shot through with intrigue, ingenuity, and adventure, and showcasing Beauman's riotous humor, spectacular imagination, and riveting prose, Madness Is Better Than Defeat is a novel without parallel: inventive, anarchic, and delightfully insane.
Author Notes
NED BEAUMAN was born in 1985 and studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He was included on Granta's 2013 list of the twenty best young British novelists, and his work has been translated into more than ten languages. He lives in London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this rowdy, thoroughly satisfying literary adventure, Beauman (Glow) takes readers deep into the jungle of Honduras. An eclectic Hollywood film crew sets out to film on location at a mysterious Mayan temple, but they arrive to find that another group of Americans got there the day before and is disassembling the temple in order to take it back as a trophy for their wealthy benefactor. There is a standoff between the two groups: the days turn into weeks and the weeks into years. After 18 years, the two factions have turned into minisocieties acting out a sort of proxy war on behalf of their two backers. The extensive cast includes a relentless newspaper gossip columnist on one side and a burgeoning ethnologist on the other. Somehow, the film crew uses the silver they find to manufacture film stock from scratch and produce millions of feet of footage that ultimately end up in a secret government archive. Yet, the mystery that eludes both camps-and the reason secret agents are circling the situation-is what's inside the temple itself. Exquisitely comic and absurd, Beauman's imaginative novel brims with the snappy dialogue, vivid scenery, and converging story lines of an old Hollywood classic; it also says something essential about the nature of film and memory. Agent: David Forrer, Inkwell Management. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Filmmakers, industrialists, and CIA agents converge in Honduras in this madcap intellectual thriller.The plot of the fourth novel by Beauman (Glow, 2015, etc.) is as overgrown as its setting, but it mainly concerns Jervis, a filmmaker determined to shoot a movie at an ancient temple in the Honduran jungle in 1938; Elias, who's been charged by his conglomerate-owning father to disassemble said temple and ship it back to America; and the standoff that ensues when representatives of both sides show up. A nearly 20-year standoff, that is, during which time the few dozen arrivals receive no input from the outside world; the predicament gives the filmmakers enough time to figure out how to make home-brew celluloid film despite being way off their shooting schedule, and because everybody misses all of World War II, nobody blinks when a shelter-seeking ex-Nazi soldier arrives proclaiming the victory of the "German-American alliance." Adding another layer of strangeness is the novel's main narrator, Zonulet, a former journalist-turned-CIA agent writing a history of inter-agency skulduggery involving the support of the fruit industry, the libertine religious philosophy of the natives, and a hallucinatory fungus discovered onsite. That's not counting the drama involving two of Zonulet's former work colleagues, various romances, and surprise revelations about Jervis' and Elias' pasts. What to make of all this? The title of the ill-fated film (Hearts in Darkness) suggests an allegorical update on Conrad, but introspection and displacement aren't big themes here; Jervis proffers a theory about effective, simple storytelling, but Beauman seems almost comically determined to flout it, lacquering scenes in ornate, often wearying detail.The overall effect is of a Paul Theroux novel on a bender: quirky, exotic, but stubbornly tangled. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* We described the ever-innovative, unabashedly unconventional Beauman's The Teleportation Accident (2013) as taking readers down a narrative wormhole. That wormhole just got deeper and, well, more corkscrewy. Beauman's latest, as brilliant as it is offbeat, begins in 1938 with an underwater wrestling match between an octopus and a longshoreman, a scene that quickly comes to feel quaintly realistic. Our narrator is a newspaper reporter called Zonulet, who moves on to become a CIA agent until the wormhole (in the form of a Mayan temple in the Honduran jungle) draws him down. The temple has attracted two very different sets of Americans: a group of New Yorkers assigned the task of disassembling the recently discovered structure and carting it back to Manhattan, and a Hollywood film crew determined to make a Conrad-inspired movie set at the temple. Twenty years on we're into the '50s now the two groups remain at loggerheads, coexisting in a state that swings from Lord of the Flies to Brigadoon in the Jungle. There's plenty more, too, from CIA dirty tricks to some charming elements of metafiction, delivered by Zonulet's sometime lover, Vansaka, who complains that Zonulet/Beauman introduces a minor character in the beginning and then expects us to remember who he is 10,000 pages later. She's right, of course, but in the end, like Vansaka, we stick with Zonulet anyway. Wormholes are like that, especially if they're as flat-out beguiling as this one. Each twist leads to something more head-scratchingly tantalizing than what came before, and it doesn't hurt that the whole thing is just so damn clever and crazy funny. Don't even think about giving up partway in, because, as Zonulet explains, until it is too late to turn back, you have not really set out. --Ott, Bill Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Jamison, adding to a large group of addiction memoirs, maps her own recovery while considering the relationship between creativity and substance abuse. The emotional firepower of the book comes in its second half, after she has embraced sobriety; our critic, Dwight Garner, called this section "close to magnificent, and genuinely moving." LOVE AND RUIN, by Paula McLain. (Ballantine, $17.) McLain's latest novel, about the marriage between the journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, takes up the question that vexed (and probably doomed) their relationship: Why must a woman choose between her career and what her husband wants her to be? McLain drew on primary sources to develop her fiery protagonist. A WORLD WITHOUT 'WHOM': The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, by Emmy J. Favilla. (Bloomsbury, $18.) The BuzzFeed copy chief discusses her plan to codify language in a digital era, balancing a need for logic with flexibility to account for how people actually talk. Along with a look at the rules she devised, the book offers a guide to the quandaries we face as the way we communicate online reshapes language itself. MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT, by Ned Beauman. (Vintage, $17.) Emboldened by "fungal clairvoyance" after inhaling mold in an old temple, a C.I.A. agent tells the story of a fateful meeting in the Honduran jungle in 1938. The novel's twists and turns touch on everything from colonialism to conspiracy theories. Our reviewer, Helene Stapinski, called the story "a kitchen-sink sendup of spy novels, 1930s Hollywood and screwball newspaper comedies, with a pinch of Pynchon thrown in for fun." ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker. (Penguin, $18.) Pinker sets out to persuade pessimists - people disturbed by today's threats like climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism across the globe - of one thing: that life has never been better, both in the West and in developing countries. The Harvard psychologist marshals an impressive array of data to back up his claim. ETERNAL LIFE, by Dara Horn. (Norton, $15.95.) When readers meet Rachel, she's a suburban great-grandmother in the 21st century. But that life is only the latest in a string of reincarnations, the consequences of a promise she made in Roman-occupied Jerusalem some 2,000 years earlier. Horn's elegant novel explores how Rachel's immortality impedes her ability to be fully, truly alive.
Library Journal Review
In a Virginia warehouse in 1959, Zonulet, a journalist-turned-CIA agent, pores through a massive archive of documents, searching for evidence that will clear his name. In so doing, he provides a long and twisty account of his attempt to locate two groups of Americans who traveled to Spanish Honduras in 1938 and vanished without a trace. One group, financed by a New York industrialist, was sent to find a sacred Mayan temple, deconstruct it, and bring it back to the United States. The other was a film crew from Los Angeles sent to find the same temple and use it as a backdrop for a Hollywood comedy. The standoff in the jungle would keep them there for years, and a more fanciful cast of characters would be hard to imagine. Among them are a Cambridge ethnologist hoping to secure her academic reputation, a malicious gossip columnist who wields power by virtue of the secrets he has uncovered, and a Nazi war criminal who convinces the news-starved people of both groups that the war ended peacefully with a German-American alliance. VERDICT Mystery, murder, and mayhem abound in this highly imaginative, devilishly plotted adventure from Granta Best of Young British Writers Beauman, author of the Man Booker long-listed The Teleportation Accident.-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.