Tue 28 Feb 2012
Archived Review: GEORGE C. CHESBRO – The Language of Cannibals.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
GEORGE C. CHESBRO – The Language of Cannibals. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1990; paperback, March 1991.
[At the time this review was written, it was in the context of mysteries and crime fiction based on the politics in the US in the 1960s.] For a while I thought this was a book that might have been among them. But Chesbro certainly doesn’t pull any punches in his work, and the reader gradually discovers that his political view of the world, as expressed in The Language of Cannibals, includes an overwhelming disgust with right-wing conservatives of all forms, no matter what era it occurred, going back to the end of World War II.
A friend of Mongo, criminology professor and a high-powered investigator Dr. Robert Frederickson, has died. He was an FBI agent whose demotion within the agency had forced him into a surveillance on a small community of pacifists a short way north of New York City. The death is apparently a boating accident, but the dead man had his own reasons for staying away from the water. Mongo suspects there may be more to the story.
Headquartered in Cairn NY is more than the Community of Conciliation. Newly arrived, and taking over the town, is the famed ultra-conservative demagogue, Elysius Culhane. What Mongo doesn’t know is that a “death squad,” designed to eliminate undesirable members of society, is also active in Cairn. And in counterbalance to the presence of equally famed pacifist folksinger Mary Tree is the KGB, or various members thereof.
I remember that Hugh Pentecost (or more likely his alter ego Judson Phillips) used to write crime fiction like this, mixed with the high voltage wires of political extremism, but I don’t think he ever had the bass, treble and volume knobs turned up as high as this, all at the same time.
Reading The Language of Cannibals might be an enjoyable ride, but only if you’re of the same mind as the author. In essence, though, it’s only a two-dimensional portrait that’s presented here. It’s the science fictional concept of parallel worlds that’s at work — or is it out-and-out fantasy? — combined with detective fiction, and while the detective story survives, I’m not sure that my sense of wonder does. My eyeballs are still tingling.
May 1991 (with revisions).
February 29th, 2012 at 10:46 am
I don’t remember this book, but I do recall writing the review. I tightened up the wording a little, added a new opening, but did my best not to change any of my thoughts about the book.
Curious, though, about what others thought about the book at the time, I found the review from Kirkus. Some excerpts:
“Another comic-strip overstatement from Chesbro…”
and
“Noisy, simplistic, and old-hat […] Chesbro needs a rest, and Mongo needs a new job.”
Keep in mind, though, the folks at Kirkus over the years have had a reputation of being tough on a lot of mysteries.
March 2nd, 2012 at 9:37 am
I read the first few books in Chesbro’s series, but tired of it. I still bought a few more of the books in the series, but they remain unread.
March 2nd, 2012 at 11:13 am
There were, believe it or not, 14 books in Chesbro’s “Mongo” series, and I wonder how many readers actually did read them all. I know I didn’t.
They were written with such high intensity and over the top in so many ways that finishing one was letting go of a live wire.
I see that nowhere in the review nor the comments has it been mentioned that Mongo was a dwarf. Before he obtained his doctorate in criminology, he was a circus acrobat (billed as Mongo the Magnificent).