It’s sort of a shame that Torsten Krol is best known for the question of whether or not he’s real. He lives in Australia, and, as the first page of Callisto reminds you, nothing else is known about him. This, of course, has led to speculation about his identity, with rumours swirling that he may actually be some other, more famous writer using a pseudonym. All of which is pretty un-germane, actually, and distracts from the reception of his new book, which is worth reading for reasons entirely unrelated to the identity of its author. So good thing we got that mystery out of the way, no?

Callisto is the story of Odell Deefus, a lumbering hunk of corn-fed Wyoming, a man with limited mental capacities and who is so convinced Condoleezza Rice’s merits as the woman of his dreams that he carries a picture of her in his pocket. It’s also the story of US paranoia, a cartoonish, kitchen-sink satire that embroils its hero in unending manifestations of an American anxiety about terrorism in particular and Islamic fundamentalism in general. Since one of the book’s pleasures is in discovering its curveball plot points and increasingly preposterous developments, I don’t want to ruin it by getting into a detailed plot summary here. (I’d avoid reading reviews, which will doubtless be forthcoming in Canada, for this reason; more than most books, their summaries will ruin this one.)

The novel succeeds on the basis of Odell’s narration, which is charmingly simple and entirely engrossing. It only fails, in fact, when it tries to be too simple by introducing malapropisms that are jarring given the subtlety with which his mental limitations are explored elsewhere. Imagine the Forrest Gump of Winston Groom’s novel wandering not through a greatest historical hits of the second half of the twentieth century but a small Kansas town where he mows lawns, drinks a lot of Captain Morgan, and notes to everyone who will listen that he has read The Yearling sixteen times. (As someone who is interested in both alcohol and the assigning of definite articles to nouns that don’t require them, Odell’s predilection for “the Captain” really resonated with me.)

By offering Odell as a sort of conduit between us and society’s reactions to the idea of terrorism, Krol succeeds in making us think not only about that society, but about how we think about it. And since Odell intends to enlist in the Army and remains a relatively unquestioning believer in his country’s trajectory, we end up thinking not just about how we think about that society, but about how we think about those who support that society’s more militaristic endeavors. In other words, Odell’s mental limitations mean that we can’t automatically rely on the narrator’s understanding of his world as we might in another novel, and what results is a sort of meta contemplation of the paranoid state and those who support it. It would be too simplistic to say that Krol indicts this mindset by aligning it with a narrator who is borderline retarded. Lots of the smarter people in this book believe in the ultimate benevolence of the police state Callisto’s America has become, too. But in giving us Odell Deefus, Krol complicates things with simplicity, and in an age where black and white can easily become too sharpened, a little complexity is not a bad thing.

Tags: Chapter and Verse, literature, united states
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