Malcolm Orange Disappears
Jan Carson
[Liberties Press]
Malcolm Orange has spent most of his life in a beat-up Volvo, travelling ‘all across America with a backseat full of grandparents’. Abandoned by his no-good father in Portland, Oregon, 11-year old Malcolm has finally settled in an old folks home with his ‘disappointingly ordinary’ brother and increasingly distracted mother. Waking up one morning to find himself covered all over with hundreds of tiny holes that seem to be getting bigger by the hour, Malcolm enlists the help of the wayward Soren James Blue, her talking cat Mr. Fluff, and Cunningham Holt, a 76-year old cynic with marbles for eyes. If Malcolm’s adventure sounds chaotic, the reader is taken on an even more bizarre journey, as the narrator sidesteps and backpedals from one character‘s history to another, each one more hysterical and misfortunate than the last. Packed with folkloristic chance encounters and picaresque trickster figures, Jan Carson’s debut novel recalls age-old storytelling traditions, and the antics of Malcolm and his madcap family are relayed with all the flamboyance and playful repetition of an Irish seanchaí.
Like all the best storytellers, Carson retains our attention throughout. She weaves her unhurried, meandering narrative from a mixture of hilarity, tenderness and near-perfect descriptive fluency. She is blessed with a gift sought by many and possessed by few: that of the long, windy, but perfectly cohesive sentence. Here, for example, are Cunningham Holt’s first impressions of New York: ‘While the city thrilled like a liquored kid and the tower blocks rose to clasp hands sixteen stories above his head, while the tall buildings shook and the sidewalks trembled with the chumbling surge of each passing streetcar, he felt only blind isolation and the absence of sunlight like an old friend recently deceased.’ Although now and then one wishes for a bit more forward momentum with which to link all these charming backstories together, it is – above all else – a yarn well spun.
Words: Lily Ní Dhomhnaill
