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Don't knock-knock Robbins until you've tried him

Sunday, June 22, 2003

By Tim Menees, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Knock, knock. Who's there? Tom Robbins and "Villa Incognito."

Robbins, the Pacific Northwest icon, iconoclast and antinovelist, starts his latest work with the mythic Tanuki, or Asian badger, parachuting to Earth by his scrotum, and ends it amid the chaos after al-Qaida's attack on 9/11.

	"Villa Incognito" By Tom Robbins Bantam Books ($24)

As Robbins' fans know, his novels are never about what they are about. This one is nominally an account of three airmen who went missing after their B-52 crashed in Laos during the Vietnam War.

They got into the drug trade and, with the arrest of one, Dern Foley of Seattle, now risk having their secret and profitable world blown up.

Along the way we're treated to bestiality, young love and Robbins' acerbic views on America, religion and, yes, vine ripe tomatoes. He's for legalizing most drugs, at least for medicinal purposes, which means he won't be dining with W anytime soon.

Dern admonishes his military interrogator: "You're sworn to uphold and defend whatever wrongheaded, incompetent, self-serving, slicky-slicky, totally corrupt interpretation of the Constitution that a gang of avaricious hillbillies and lying shysters decide to ... forget it."

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Tanuki, who, after landing safely in the distant past, takes on anthropomorphic traits, raids a Japanese farmer's stash of sake and beds a young Japanese farm girl. He moves to the city and becomes a raconteur and ladies' man, er, ladies' badger.

Enter Foley, Mars Stubblefield and Dickie Goldwire, who share the stage with Tanuki's descendant, Lisa Ko. They have happily remained missing, living incognito in Laos' mountains, refining opium and selling rubies.

The trio have taken over a crumbling villa accessible only by a cable stretching across a 750-foot mist-shrouded gorge, a cable stretched, naturally, by a Laotian circus troop that spends the off-season in the mountains practicing, in part, tightrope-walking.

When Foley, dressed as a Catholic priest, is nabbed in Thailand, the Pentagon and the CIA hope to break him and find his criminal comrades.

Robbins, however, never lets you willingly suspend your disbelief. When he gets rolling with a magical description of the mountains and the gorge, he tosses in openers to knock-knock jokes. Or short poems.

Meet me in Cognito, baby,
We'll soon leave our pasts behind us
The present is always a mystery,
As the future never fails to remind us.

He and his characters get in our face over pronunciation -- the adjective is "sacraLEEgious."

And the Bible: "The word lord didn't exist in biblical times."

And drugs: Heroin is "a drug equally as addictive and almost as dangerous as nicotine."

And semantics: The communists "employ the term 'people's' with a veracity every bit as sincere as 'vine ripe' and 'farm fresh.' "

And home: Lisa can't understand "how Americans can be so proud, so full of adolescent bravado, and on the other hand be so transparently insecure."

Robbins doesn't confine himself to subtlety or atmospherics or linear narrative. When he gives us a brief history of the villagers, he reminds us we have "passed through the Michener zone."

If his dialogue sometimes clunks, his metaphors can sail:

"Generally, if spirit is the fresh air vent and ambient lighting in the house of consciousness, if spirit is the electrical system that illuminates that house, then soul is the smoky fireplace, the fragrant oven, the dusty wind cellar the strange creaks we hear in the floorboards late at night."

Try this: "... a lamp flashed on in that chamber of Lisa's cerebrum where the Dilemma Twins had been playing Ping-Pong in the murk."

He fumbles a couple of facts. Two of his antiheroes dropped out of college for the Air Force's officers training school (OTS), which he mistakenly calls OCS (for the Army's officers candidate school). That was about the time I went through OTS, and OTS demanded a sheepskin.

His CIA flies out to San Fran to grill Foley, and the military chases around Seattle after Foley's sister. (Note: The CIA operates overseas.)

Perhaps that's Robbins' rich imagination at work.

Do we know what our government is up to in the middle of the night?

Knock, knock.

Who's there?