A review of Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus
by Martin McCarvill


Right from the start, there are some brilliant sentences in this book, even if the overall action takes some dynamiting to break into. This is odd, because on the sentence level things are far from psychedelically unclear – the surreal is like a lucid, programmatic psychedelic – no outtasite or gabba gabba hey, just the chance meeting of the sewing machine and the umbrella described like you’re sitting down to dinner. This book is surreal for sure. The reporterly impossible. More factual clarity, less overall plot logic.

This lack of narrative thrust can cause you to tune out when Morse’s inventiveness, exuberance and humour flag, which is relatively infrequently. Some of his bon mots are downright straightforward: “There are countries where you can do as you please and countries where you can think as you please. But I doubt there’s anywhere you can do both at the same time.” Some are much more freeqy, and it’s nice that you can zoom out and glide over the waves when taking it action by predicate gets too chunky. Joycean, in that sometimes you wanna unpack and other times just get word-wasted.

The “episodes” in the first half, relating the escapades of a global monopoly capitalist fuck/trickster wizard called Minor, are actually a bit longer on balance I think than the chapters of the second half, which is loosely a parody of SF in which humans are called “Dulklings”; but really it’s a fairly seamless transition, except that the second half is aliens on top of the first half’s secret agent schtick. All of these are more tones than threads, anyway, regions of the palette, since it’s hard to follow the action in any realistic way.

The first half is less over the top, perhaps – there are still more of the small, natural reactions to crazy crap that make you smile at the ballsiness – Minor gets sniped, a flower springs up, but it’s the way he brushes it away with annoyance that convinces – the quotidian reaction making it almost a silent film, a raised eyebrow on the face of a Chaplin or somebody. The real reaction would be screaming catatonia, and too many authors would go too far into the alternative and just effuse us to death Pynchonian; but here the characters are true denizens of their milieu, something rarer in fiction than it might initially appear, and give us the reactions of, like, really arch action heroes. Oh! It’s camp! And Minor is an antivillain for our times who puts the Baudribbles and drabbles in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis to shame.

I hope I’m not making this sound dry. Surrealism is an acceptable reaction to a surreal world in which each of us acts not in his interest every single day. It’s not as good a reaction as rage, but it’s more than adequate, and some rage does poke through the surr. here. But more humour: I lolled or lqarled* like double digits of times reading this, which isn’t an experience I usually have with guys that think they’re funny. And it helps you deal with the fact that each episode ends inconclusively, a draw match conducted for obscure purposes between shifting identities moving in mysterious ways.

BUT do let me note that each episode also advances the plot, a little, which speaks to craft considering there hardly is a plot. Each time, the weird truthiness you’ve developed regarding who a character might sort of be and what capable of shifts, or the balance of power is overturned (even though you didn’t get that you know F or Bebe Lala or Lax Laxness was in the ascendency until they got comeupped) or you get a new angle on how the laws of freaky fysics might reveal another wrinkle.

Major Ruckus, the second half, gives you more opportunity to glide and murmurate, which is not a bad thing, kind of like running through the surrealist Louvre or something (running through museums in general always a good plan, btw. O synaesthetic repast!).

Hey, you’re the one in the chair and you can read this however you want to and I don’t think you’ll have much trouble finding a way that you can enjoy yourself.


*laughing quietly and relatively long