As the Flag Unravels
SEARLES, GEORGE J.
As the Flag Unravels Sailor Song By Ken Kesey Viking. 533 pp. $23.50. Reviewed by George J. Searles Associate Professor of Humanities, Mohawk Valley Community College; editor, "A Casebook on...
...Small wonder you shouldn't want to watch the flaws become monthly more obvious...
...if you haven't noticed but your sky is still clear and your air still sweet...
...is to give up on the facts and look at the legend...
...He includes a great deal of purposeful foolery, flooding the narrative with farcical incongruities, crude asides, wacky in-jokes, and countless allusions to literary classics and popular culture...
...They quickly transform Kuinak into a cinegenic yet bogus version of itself...
...Set in the early 21st century, this big, teeming book takes as its locus the fictitious Alaskan fishing village of Kuinak, somewhere north of Skagway...
...Bob Dylan pops up alongside Yeats...
...editor, "A Casebook on Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'" It has been quite a while since One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) established Ken Kesey as an important American writer...
...Remote as Kuinak is, its people must suffer the severely compromised circumstances of Kesey's envisioned future...
...The worldwide chaos that concludes the story is, of course, symbolic, much like the falcon's disorientation in W. B. Yeats' "The Second Coming," which is cited in the book...
...John Synge competes with Kesey's friends the Grateful Dead (referred to as "The Dreadful Great...
...All you have to do is let us use your location...
...Invested in...
...They include such colorful figures as hard-drinking Alice the Angry Aleut, former eco-terrorist Ike Sallas (known as the "Bakatcha Bandit" during the environmental wars of the now-bygone 1990s), and the irrepressible Emil Greer, Sallas' self-styled Rastafarian sidekick...
...history...
...Small wonder you didn't want to lean down and look close??it was your flag unraveling, the one you'd fought for...
...A tougher and dirtier version of Northern Exposure's, Cicely, the engagingly rundown little community provides a safe if grubby haven for its rowdy inhabitants: a mix of "Deaps" (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples) and Lower-48 misfits...
...Buildings are painted, eyesores are removed, props are erected...
...In sum, Sailor Song is vintage Ken Kesey: not for the faint-hearted, perhaps, but certainly instructive, and never boring...
...Like the "Combine" in Cuckoo's Nest or the union in Great Notion, the film moguls are obviously agents of evil...
...Terrible mayhem ensues, culminating in a rebellion of Nature itself...
...Addressing Sallas and friends, a Foxcorp representative declares: "I am the Mouth from the South and the official speech man for Foxcorp, and first off I want to take the proper-tune-ditty to thank you one and all, citizens of Kuinak, from the bottom of our corporate heart for the warm welcome your wonderful community has afforded us...
...Kesey foresees Alaska as the final frontier, and Kuinak is a last refuge for the gritty, self-reliant lifestyle he seems to admire most...
...You may...
...He goes on: "A faulty equation must have been allowed to creep into the intricate formula of warp and woof at the Korean flag factory...
...all digital chipware scrambled...
...This would be a bit much if it were meant to be taken straight...
...Lured by the mystique of Hollywood, the promise of profit and the prospect of orgiastic revels aboard the company's huge wing-sail yacht, they allow themselves to become swept up in a feeding frenzy...
...Namely, big bucks, folks, let's tell it like it is??big bucks, hot deals, and high times...
...On the one hand, Kesey's legend offers a cautionary message, found in such details as the "flaws in the flag's fabric, the signs of irreversible unraveling...
...Nevertheless, his long-awaited third novel proves he is still deserving of his reputation...
...On the other hand, Sailor Song is a gambol the kind of exercise in risk-taking and myth-making that has always been Kesey's long suit...
...Much of the sense of realism that informs Sailor Song derives from on-site "homework" done some years ago...
...Maybe the reason is simply that misery indeed loves company...
...Before writing Cuckoo's Nest, he worked as a psychiatric aide in a veterans' hospital...
...Even the Loyal Order of Underdogs, Kuinak's ragtag fraternal organization, is drawn into the folly, hiring on as a home-grown security force...
...What we have before us, then, is a fast, bumpy, careening tale closely akin to the runaway railway-car ride survived by Sallas, Greer and a drug-dealer called "Billy the Squid," or to the fabled psychedelic bus trip that the author and his Merry Pranksters braved in 1964...
...to gather background for Great Notion he spent time with loggers...
...All magnetic memory systems are "deleted, tape and disk, mainframe and backup...
...Life savings...
...John Steinbeck shares the stage with the Beatles...
...You got what is called in the biz a location, aspectacular location with scenery still un-trammeled everything south of here has just about been trammeled...
...if one overlooks the smell of fish guts...
...What is that, may you ask...
...and everywhere there are salutes to, and the unmistakable influences of, fellow novelist Thomas Pynchon...
...Long narrative passages, loaded with specialized terminology and meticulously rendered detail, offer a wealth of accurate reportage about saltwater fishing...
...Clean deal or what...
...The village is declawed and made sterile, and the locals collaborate in their own undoing...
...Kesey takes a giant leap here, arranging for a global cataclysm brought about by the spontaneous reversal of the earth's magnetic poles??a freakish catastrophe that roils the seas, triggers devastating ice storms, and dooms the electronic age...
...Despite its gloomier features, the book's closing scene is upbeat and ends on a note of "victory...
...Enter Foxcorp Studios, a big-time Hollywood moviemaker intent on using Kuinak as the setting for a film version of the children's classic Shoola and the Sea Lion (written in the novel by a New Jersey woman under an Eskimo pen name, but actually published by Kesey himself last year...
...The Alaskan outpost has to make do with synthetic liquor, synthetic dope, even synthetic experience, as people don high-tech goggles to seek solace in virtual reality...
...It's also my joyous task to welcome you to the Silver Fox, folks, because, and I'm shooting straight here, you got something we want...
...Throughout his career, though, Kesey has repeatedly altered the actual in his fiction, where the trip is as important as the destination, if not more so...
...The world is in extremis, with everything winding down, wearing out, devolving toward entropy...
...It is also a place of equal opportunity: In these bare-knuckled environs women are no less two-fisted than men, and Native Americans are treated no differently than everyone else...
...On all fronts the artificial has replaced the genuine...
...Or had been planted there on purpose like a recombinant virus...
...all nations in turmoil, all people in godless despair...
...Sailor Song is an embodiment of its own claim that "the best way to get an angle on...
...The heroes of his earlier novels R. P. McMurphy and Chief Bromden from Cuckoo's Nest, and the Stamper clan of Great Notion??would feel right at home in this town, with its belly-up-to-the-bar ambience...
...They are the hallmark of Kesey's penchant for first-hand experience...
...and we got something you want...
...And I'll tell you...
Vol. 75 • September 1992 • No. 11
