Bathing the Lion Review

I recently read Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll.  My mom recommended Carroll to me, and a while back I read The Land of Laughs and enjoyed it enough to put a bunch of Carroll's books on my To Read list.  I checked a few weeks ago, and found that Bathing the Lion was available at the library for immediate download.  Score!

I didn't know what I was in for with this one.  Carroll's stuff is all a little weird, but this one was much further down the spectrum of weird, heading into surreal territory. 

It's impossible to tell much about this one without giving away the story's secrets and surprises.  That should tell you a lot right there.  I can't tell you what this book is about, because I didn't know until the end.  I had no idea where it was going.  Every time I thought I knew, I was wrong.  It kept changing what it was about and where it was headed.

At one point, the book is about collecting all of human experience by sampling events from the lives of thousands of people and mooshing those disjointed experiences together into one whole that makes sense.  In a way, this book is like that.  There are mundane back stories presented for each of the characters--little tidbits about their lives, little moments that stuck with them or didn't.  You expect these stories to reappear later, to have an effect on the plot, to mean something.  But they don't.  They're there and then they're gone. 

The same goes with the fantastical components of this novel.  Sometimes the novel is about dreams.  Sometimes it's about "mechanics," a race of super-beings that "fix" things around the cosmos.  How the dreams work, or what things in the dreams mean, or what they need to do with the knowledge they gain from the dreams are never explained.  The mechanics use special tools in their fixes, they present concepts through encoded messages or pictures, they have some sort of culture and traditions and language.  But while I'm fascinated, wanting to know more about all of this, I'm not given more.  I'm given an amuse-bouche of world building, and then it's gone.

So in all this, through most of the novel, it feels like there is just a string of unrelated things happening.  They don't lead from one to another, nor does one event cause the next.  There's a rolly chair that talks to people, AND THEN an elephant shows up, AND THEN someone's on an airplane and puts a lot of effort into drawing a very important picture, AND THEN...time travel?  Okay.  Are we ever going to find out what was up with that elephant?

No.  It's just there.  Chillin'.

But as someone who has come out the other side, the haphazardness of it all does make sense eventually.  The ending is not as satisfying as I would have hoped, but it does make you feel okay that we never found out about that elephant.  It makes you feel okay that everything wasn't wrapped up.