Charlie Peace: A Fable

Jack, a petty criminal seeking meaning, truth, and guidance for his life, embarks on a search for Charlie Peace, a two-thousand-year-old storyteller who had been a source of wisdom and insight for Jack during his Yorkshire childhood

A bizarre, wildly surreal fantasy that lampoons Christianity and organized religion, this convoluted tale makes Salvador Dali's psychospiritual rantings look tame. Narrator Jack Peachey, an English burglar hailed by thousands as the true Jesus, turns talcum powder into cocaine and causes the clothes of women around him to dematerialize. Jack is a disciple of a religious cultist, a former Kansas farmboy who became a lion tamer in a circus with Christian revivalist themes and who assumed the name of the circus manager, Charlie Peace, after the latter's death in a fire on the island of Tobago. Peachey goes to seedy Manhattan to track down Peace and a miniature crystal talisman linked to the medieval Albigensian heresy. There Jack meets Ottoline Ottolyne, an heirless linked to the Church of the Millennium, a heretical cult which uses sex as a sacrament. Interrupting these shenanigans are anachronistic retellings of the Gospels narrated by Jack, now charged with murder and imprisoned on Rikers Island, N.Y. Pickering ( Blue Gate of Babylon ) overworks parody and sacrilegious gags to serve his theme that every true believer is a natural heretic.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A mishmash of a tale that mixes the fantastic misadventures of a modern-day hero often mistaken for Christ with stories from the New Testament retold from an offbeat off-putting slant. English novelist and journalist Pickering (The Blue Gate of Babylon, 1989; Wild About Harry, 1985) assembles a meandering narrative that goes back and forth in time, now and then rehashing the same material. The Albigensians, medieval heretics who believed the earth was created by an evil god, are mentioned several times- -and certainly the world Pickering describes is nothing to cheer about. There is also an on-again/off-again quest for a City of Gold or its jeweled replica held by title character Charlie Peace, who has mythic dimensions and may be 2000 years old. Jack Peachy, the hero, was intrigued by Peace's stories as a child in Yorkshire and goes to New York with his sister Poppy in search of him and his City of Gold bauble. Feverish, dysfunctional New York is one of the targets of Pickering's satiric barbs, as is America's religious right. But nothing has much impact because the incidents--realistic or fantastic--seem to be thrown together arbitrarily, making the whole less than the sum of its parts. Whether Jack lives or dies or simply withdraws to a quiet corner becomes of no compelling interest since he, like the book, appears to be fashioned at whim. The Christ who surfaces in the stories here, sometimes on a motorcycle, isn't made out to be worth the effort of either worshipping or disavowing. The humor is largely jejune or spoiled by a sense of strain, and the sex, though graphic, lacks sensuality. A Pilgrim's Progress going nowhere (which may have been the author's intention). -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Just who is this Jesus character, and why is everybody out to get him? Jack Peachey, a brilliant but troubled orphan recently released from prison, finds himself caught up in tricks such as turning talcum powder into cocaine and genuinely inexplicable events such as healing the sick and walking on water. Is he the latest incarnation of Christ or a pawn in a religious scam? Pickering skillfully interweaves three stories--those of Jack and Poppy, Charlie Peace and Molly Mooney, and Christ and his 13th apostle, Pax--to create a web of surprise and suspense, miracle and horror. Some may claim that Charlie Peace is as heretical to Christianity as The Satanic Verses is to Islam, but it may be closer to a more outrageous Last Temptation of Christ . Some fundamentalists and prudes will be offended. More daring readers will be fascinated and challenged by this lively and original work. Highly recommended.
- Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. at Chico
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.