The Teleportation Accident: A Novel

The Washington Post - Wendy Smith

Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

From the Publisher

"Brilliant... If there was ever any worry that [Beauman] might have crammed all his ideas into his first book, the prize-winning Boxer, Beetle, this makes it clear he kept a secret bunker of his best ones aside." – Joe Dunthorne, The Guardian

"Inspired... Beauman has an unflagging imagination and an indefatigable gift for comedy." - Publishers Weekly

"Funny and startlingly inventive... Beauman is undoubtedly a writer of prodigious talent, and there are enough ideas [here]... to fill myriad lesser novels." – The Financial Times

"There is so much going on in this truly bizarre novel—everything from slapstick to noir to steampunk—that discombobulated readers may feel as though they’ve fallen down a narrative wormhole. But what a wormhole! ... Brilliant." - Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review) 

“[A] pyrotechnical... violently clever... highly cerebral… frantically entertaining pasteboard extravaganza… Extraordinary." –The Sunday Times

"Popping with ideas, fizzing with vitality, and great fun." – The Independent on Sunday

"Stylistically radical... Virtuosic... An unquestionably brilliant novel, ribald and wise in equal measure... Witty and sometimes deeply moving." –Times Literary Supplement

“A glorious, over-the-top production, crackling with inventive wit and seething with pitchy humour . . . It’s as if the English tradition of humorous novels (PG Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh) and American comic fiction (Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth) have had their molecules recombined . . . A beguiling success.” —The Scotsman

“If you care about contemporary fiction, you must read this.” —Tatler

The Barnes & Noble Review

Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published V. The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon. This type of novel can function in a stripped-down condition — all plot — but also thrives when festooned with arcane systems and symbology. The mode has proven congenial to everyone from Umberto Eco to Dan Brown and shows no signs of decaying.

Ned Beauman's first novel, Boxer, Beetle, is a majestic example of the genre, situated midway along the spectrum that runs from pure storytelling to mythic and occult brocaded allusiveness. Our contemporary narrator is Kevin Broom, compulsive smalltime dealer in Nazi memorabilia. He's employed by a rich real estate magnate with the same avaricious and slightly dirty impulses, who's on the track of an astonishing and rare item. But the intervention of a hired assassin also out for the prize raises the stakes considerably, leading Kevin on mad quest across modern Britain.

Meanwhile, back in the mid-1930s, entomologist Philip Erskine — self- hating homosexual and eugenics-spouting fascist — happens to become fascinated by a bantamweight boxer named Sinner Roach. Their tale actually fills most of these pages, and it's rather like Indiana Jones meets Monty Python. We encounter various underworlds and upper crusts. Erskine and Sinner, as well as all the subsidiary characters, are depicted with a light, assured, hand. The writing, especially the dialogue and strikingly gonzo metaphors, leaps off the page and into your lap, much like one of Erskine's overbred beetles or Sinner's punches. The musings on fascism, Darwinism, the class structure and a host of other issues is bright-eyed and compelling. Beauman offers thematic and prose flavorings akin to Liz Jensen, T. C. Boyle, Tom McCarthy and Will Self, but blended into a unique voice.

On first glance, Beauman's second novel, The Teleportation Accident, abandons this parallel construction, having no twenty- first-century thread, all its realtime action taking place from the years 1931 to 1962 (with a couple of essential exceptions, especially a coda set in a far future owing something to Kurt Vonnegut). But on closer inspection, the bipartite framework is intact, for the original incident that gives the novel its title occurred in 1679, and it impels the entire book, like a small buried seed from which a lush plant sprouts.

In that far-off year, Venetian set designer Adriano Lavicini debuted a device intended to simulate teleportation onstage, instantly transporting a character from one painted milieu to another. The mechanism was to be used in a Parisian theater, with Louis XIV in the audience. But disaster ensued, with the partial destruction of the building, resulting in Lavicini's own death and the deaths of many others.

Savvy readers will immediately note a kinship to Christopher Priest's The Prestige, a novel of similar legerdemain, honored by a film of great aplomb. But any such comparisons must take into account that the theatrical aspect here rapidly becomes secondary, and that the tone, opposed to Priest's solemnity, is rather as if Christopher Guest & Co. (A Mighty Wind; Best in Show) were at the controls.

In 1930s Berlin, our quite despicable antihero, Egon Loeser ("Ego Loser?" Yes!), also a set designer in a desultory fashion, is intent on recreating Lavicini's mechanism. But his ambitions reach an abortive end early on. Just as well, since he has fallen in love with one Adele Hitler (no relation to any rising Bavarian politician), Egon's ex-tutoree now matured into a ravishing beauty. She will function as the strange attractor of Egon's life for the next ten years and more. He will follow her first to Paris and then to Los Angeles, experiencing the most exquisitely dreadful comical experiences possible, hilarious encounters with as wild a cast of eccentrics and madmen, scammers and venal self- servers, hapless saps and trodden-down dreamers, as you have seen since the heyday of J. P. Donleavy or Evelyn Waugh. All of these incidents are presented in elegant yet forceful prose, graced with the most arch and rude colorful metaphors. "It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon."

But woven into the weft of mimetic tomfoolery is a warp of highly unusual events. What really happened in the Théâtre des Encornets in 1769? Why is the U.S. State Department using the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft as their battle plan? Has Professor Bailey of CalTech actually succeeded in building a working teleportation device? Who is the serial killer stalking the campus? What lies in the locked vault of car-polish millionaire Colonel Gorge? Will Mickey Spillane–style author Stent Mutton be able to switch genres to science fiction? (Shades of Kilgore Trout!) I guarantee that no reader will succeed in outguessing Beauman. He plays more than fair but juggles so many balls so hypnotically, that all bets are off. Yet in a bravura finale of "four endings," he ties everything together satisfactorily and effortlessly with the precision of a brain surgeon.

Beauman's tale gives immense pleasure in two areas outside of sheer plot. First is his endless fecundity of invention and specificity. No setting is unburnished, no individual, even walk-ons, left undistinguished. Second, and more amazing, is his patterning ability — a skill so important to an author yet one of those writerly talents hard to quantify and rarely cited in reviews. It's a delight to watch as an anecdote mentioned on page 4 gets its punch line 300 pages later. Such frissons are all too rare. Teleporting directly into the ranks of such mythomaniacal jesters as Nick Sagan and Christopher Moore, Ned Beauman kicks any sophomore qualms to the curb.

Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul Di Filippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award — all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, andThe San Francisco Chronicle.

Reviewer: Paul Di Filippo