Madness is better than defeat. Down the river is the light of reason.

(From Orson Welles’s screenplay for an unproduced adaptation of Heart of Darkness 1939)

I recently made two simultaneous discoveries. And they go together quite well. The first, after a recent trip to Iceland, is Víkingur Ólafsson, the Icelandic pianist, whose recently-released Mozart & Contemporaries breathes new life into, well, Mozart and his contemporaries. It goes well with the book that follows, so go ahead and push the play button below before proceeding. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Is there any feeling a bibliophile loves more than looking for a book for (literally) years, finally finding it, only to find it exceeds your wildest expectations?

My book recommendation engine The Hawaii Project mentioned Madness is Better than Defeat by Ned Beauman to me when it was released back in 2017 because it knew I would like it (it’s good at that kind of thing). I put it on my TBR. A blurb:

A wild, astonishing literary thriller by arguably England’s most accomplished young writer, about Manhattan and Hollywood in the 1930s, Mayan gods, and a CIA operation gone terribly wrong–the Man Booker short-listed Ned Beauman’s magnum opus thus far.

Those of you who know my love of espionage books, and the works of Tim Powers, could guess this might appeal to me. Declare, and Last Call, especially – they are in the very small set of books I’ve ever given 5 stars too, back when I thought ratings and reviews were a useful thing to do. And this book has that same “smell”. It especially whiffs of Declare. But still, I’d been disappointed before, so I didn’t just order it. And strangely, it never made it to any of my local bookstores. (I know, I could look at it online; but it’s not the same). So, year after year, whenever I was in a bookstore, used bookstores especially, I would look for it along with other wayward books. Never found it.

Until yesterday.

Down in Raleigh, NC, visiting with people where I grew up, I wandered into Mr. Mike’s Used Bookstore. (No, not Magic Mike’s, although I might have made that joke to my wife…). There, along with a book about Caesar’s Legions, Caroline Alexander’s book about The Iliad, and a book about the science of music perception (thinking about doing a music startup/project…), there it was. The cover in all its Mayan glory.

Well, I liked the cover quite a bit more than what I’d seen before. The fonts looked good. The book had a nice feel to it. Read the first page. It might as well have picked up where Indiana Jones left off – a warehouse full of mysterious objects and an investigation by a CIA officer. By page two, we’ve encountered rum aged in barrels made from coffin wood, which has magical properties:

This is how I know. During the failed Cuban War of Independence in 1868, a wealthy Spanish family called the Azpeteguias, who owned sugar plantations near the Valle de Vinales, were besieged inside their villa by their own farmers. They died of yellow fever, all sixteen of them, before they could be relieved by the army. It was decided to send the bodies to Havana for burial to ensure they wouldn’t be desecrated by the locals. But the farmers ambushed the caravan in the hills, prying open the coffins and tipping the bodies into the dust. In 1953, when I was still working for the agency in Cuba, I did a significant favor for a friend of mine in Pinar del Rio and afterward he gave me a bottle of rum that had been aged in a barrel made from staves of Azpeteguia coffin wood.

I have about twelve ounces left. It’s what’s called a diagnostic liquor. According to folk medicine, the long aftertaste is the most volatile fraction of the rum escaping out of your mouth as tinted vapor after it’s already washed through your guts. You taste yourself on it. There are some old bourbons with the same property…

I get that rare feeling. Of having taken one small wrong turn, and left the real world to enter a just-slightly-adjacent world that’s just as real, but not quite the same, where the same rules don’t apply.

OK. Sold. It goes into the pile to go home with me. ($4.99 btw).

Now, I’m on the plane and diving in.

Quickly, after learning about magic rum, one of our protagonists is dragged away from a large wager involving a longshoreman wrestling a live octopus in a diving tank, force-fed a nebulizing spray that instantly sobers him up, and taken to see his oh-so-rich father, who informs him he is to go to the Spanish Honduras to disassemble and bring home (!) a newly discovered Mayan ruin. (Which ruins our rum-drinking CIA hero claim have magical properties btw). Meanwhile a young aspiring filmmaker is taken to see a hermetic Howard Hughes like character who owns a film studio, was involved in a gondola crash that nearly killed him, and now lives in a spider’s nest of bell-laded cloths made from the Gondola to prevent anyone from sneaking up on him unawares. (Meanwhile, the Vikingur Olafsson’s Phantom-of-the-Opera-like music in the playlist above is playing in my headphones…). I feel like I’m watching an old black-and-white film with this soundtrack… Anyway our filmmaker is to go make a movie at the same Mayan temple. And a local newspaper editor is berating his young gossip writers for their lack of performance while a small Pomeranian barks at him to calm down (this scene is hysterical but I really cannot do it justice here), eventually deciding to send one of them along with the film crew to the Honduras.

By this time, I am valiantly and fruitlessly trying to stifle hysterical laughter, the tears are running down my face behind my COVID mask, my wife is shushing me and I’m starting to draw alarmed looks from my fellow  passengers.

Then there is the young archaelogist who has stumbled into the middle of an orgy involving her archaelogist mentor who escaped from the Mayan jungle with, shall we say, a new outlook on life? And suggests she go to the Honduras in his stead?

And I’m only 40 pages in.

This is why I read.

I’m reading as slowly as possible because I know I’ve found magic, and that I’ll only be able to experience this magic once for the first time, and it might not last. Every other paragraph is a turn of phrase or sentence I want to highlight. The writing is outstanding, this is fantasy writing done by a Booker-nominated writer with a demented imagination. That transporting experience when you realize that for 2 hours you’ve been completely unaware of anything happening around you.

What books click for people is very personal; your mileage may vary (online reviews seem to adore this book or hate it or both, no middle ground here). But Madness is Better than Defeat starts as a virtuoso performance. Worth a read.