07-30-2016, 02:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-19-2019, 06:04 PM by Dekalb_Blues.)
From Library Journal, July 15, 2007:
Imprisoned in a nearly featureless room, Jane Charlotte is being interrogated by a man in a white lab coat. It seems she’s killed somebody. How? And why? Her answer is a convoluted tale of a vast secret organization whose agents fight evil by keeping humanity under “ubiquitous surveillance” and selectively assassinating the “bad monkeys,” people deemed irredeemably evil. Of course, such vast and secret organizations tend to have equally vast and secret nemeses. They also have to keep careful tabs on their own agents. Jane’s not quite certain which side her captors are on, and it’s an open question whether she’s crazy or not. There are echoes here of the pervasive paranoia of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Walker Percy’s unreliable jailhouse narrator in Lancelot, as well as the sardonic black humor of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, not to mention Max Barry’s sly satires of the absurdities of bureaucratic organizations. Cult favorite Ruff’s scenario inevitably raises questions about the morality of secret and summary “justice,” but the story moves along in a fast-paced, satirical style that never slows down or turns preachy. Jane’s tangled tale, from her confused, youthful introduction to this complicated secret world to the final, catastrophic mission, will keep most readers guessing until the last page. — Bradley A. Scott
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
From BookPage, August 2007:
Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder, and she’s being examined by a police psychiatrist to discover whether she is fit for trial—or fit for a straitjacket. There are a few wrinkles, however, that need to be ironed out. She might not be Jane Charlotte. She might not have killed anyone. She might not be in jail.
Right from page one, you’re already halfway down the rabbit hole in Matt Ruff’s latest novel, Bad Monkeys. Ruff, the author of the critically lauded Set This House in Order, Fool on the Hill and Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, ladles a dollop of William S. Burroughs into an Ian Fleming base in such a mesmerizing way it will have you scratching your head and doubling back to make sure you scooped up every psychedelic-laden morsel.
A shadowy, non-governmental, but very powerful agency (think Impossible Missions Force here) called “the organization” engaged the services of a young Jane Charlotte to capture or extinguish miscreants whom they call “Bad Monkeys.” Jane’s particular subdivision—and you can bet they don’t have business cards—is The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons.
In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” and Jane Charlotte recounts to the police psychiatrist the curious turn of events that led her to be picked for her work as a high-minded (and highly irregular) vigilante. Along the way, she encounters agents of The Troop (think SMERSH, T.H.R.U.S.H. or the DMV), evildoers whose sole aim it is to thwart the organization and introduce wickedness into the world. Trouble is, her long-lost brother just might be The Troop’s criminal mastermind, and Jane Charlotte may have to lure him out—or take him out.
Told mostly in flashback, the plot twists like capellini in a bubbling cauldron, and the complex sequence of events both demands—and rewards—your rapt attention. — Thane Tierney
Copyright 2007 ProMotion, Inc.
Decidedly baddish-appearing monkey.
Is "Jane Charlotte" a reliable or unreliable narrator? In fiction, as in life, the unreliable narrator is a narrator who can't be trusted. Either from ignorance or self-interest, this narrator speaks with a bias, makes mistakes, or even lies. Part of the pleasure and challenge of these first-person stories is working out the truth and understanding why the narrator is not straightforward. It's also one tool an author uses to create an aura of authenticity in his or her work. The term originates from Wayne C. Booth’s 1961 Rhetoric of Fiction, and though it is a key component of modernism, we find unreliable narratives in classics like Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) (in both "Lockwood" and "Nelly Dean") and Jonathan Swift's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, etc. [popularly known as Gulliver's Travels ] (1726/35).
Apparently not-so-bad although baddishly-hair-dayed monkey.
I find Bad Monkeys to be an outstanding fictional representation of the kind of complexity one finds in real-life counterintelligence analysis (which to some of us is our sometimes-interesting but more-oftenly-dreary workaday pursuit, even as to most others it is the childishly misconceived exotica so provocatively and disinformationally depicted in most spy thrillers) some penetration operations involving the weaponized use of the deceptive persona are so cunningly designed to exploit the epistemological and ontological blind spots of the target organization's friend-or-foe-differentiation algorithms (stemming from the inherent provincial-conditioning Gödel-limit weaknesses in its consensus-reality-imbued paradigm of what "identity" itself can possibly be) that determining the bona fides of the persona in question is a formally undecidable problem -- unless the canny analyst tasked with such a challenge can transcend his own cultural and other conditioning (mostly a function of the time/place of his upbringing) so as to navigate out of an otherwise endlessly ambiguous abstract hall of mirrors designedly keyed to his expected relative inability to self-reference in an unbiased fashion (which fatally handicaps the attempt to orient properly within just those wider objective truth-realms that need to be accessed to truly perceive deception in its irrepressibly self-evident anomalousness). Successfully doing this, halting the infinite regress of uncertainty, is the equivalent of the type of life-alteringly illuminative epiphany, with attendant radical worldview-change, that is found in the typical so-called "mystical" enlightenment-experience of satori. (In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to the experience of kenshō, "seeing into one's true nature".)
Decidedly baddish-appearing monkey-descendant.
http://variety.com/2016/film/news/margot...201818874/
WARNING! DO NOT GO HERE: http://bookzz.org/s/?q=matt+ruff+bad+mon...nsion=&t=0 (AND IF YOU DO, WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT DOWNLOAD A FREE FILE OF THIS OR ANY OTHER IN-COPYRIGHT WORK! CIRCUMVENTION OF CONCEPTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IS OF A DOUBLEPLUS-UNGOODNESS WHICH WILL WARP YOUR MIND, CURVE YOUR SPINE, AND HASTEN THE DOWNFALL OF OCEANIAN CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT. GODSPEED T.P.P.! 'NUFF SAID.)
By the way, I might in passing make reference to an especially culturally-significant imaginative work of fiction in the STS-epic-surreal-saga genre: The Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 26 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Gov't. Printing Ofc., 1964) which had as its antihero a not-so-very-STS personage mischievously mythologized so as to plausibly portray the very epitome of STS-ness (brilliantly complex and nuanced use here of the good old unreliable-narrator as literary mechanism to help the story along), thus craftily drawing attention away from the true villains of the story, who are left for you to perceive by a judicious metafictional reading-between-the-lines. Aficionados of detective-mysteries and spy-thrillers will get a kick out of this seminal tour de force epochally kicking off the advent of the Modern Art of The Big Lie. Get the whole lulz-filled set! https://www.gpo.gov/featured/WarrenCommission.htm
Cheers!