At 105 airy, double-spaced pages padded with photographs, Mr. Thundermug is barely a novella. It would be a fairy tale, but its story (about a talking baboon) is too childish for adults and its themes (bureaucracy, alienation, the cold comfort of an extramarital affair) are too adultish for children. Mr. Thundermug's ideal readers have adult souls and child-simple minds—its ideal readers are stoners.
Mr. Thundermug is an eloquent baboon, but his wife and children are as dumb as their cousins on the savanna. They live in a condemned building in the center of an imaginary city that is half Western (the restaurants serve sole meunière) and half Chinese (temples, monsoons). The author, Cornelius Medvei, grew up in England and worked in China—his descriptive passages of the city are more vivid than the rest of his prose, like a fond reminiscence: "Incontinent, boiling clouds sucked up water from the surface of the river and carried it a few hundred yards before dumping it on the cracked tiles and crumbling Tarmac of the city below... The cycle was so rapid that the rainwater, which the poorer citizens collected in tubs and pails, still seemed to taste of the river."
All's well with the Thundermugs until city bureaucrats discover the baboons and try to tangle them in the net of local law. If Mr. Thundermug is an animal, he should be in the zoo. If he is a person, he is committing animal cruelty by illegally keeping three exotic animals. Mr. Thundermug is 5 human years old, and should be in an orphanage. But he is 378 baboon years old and eligible for a pension.
It's all very Kafka-for-simians (and stoners and drunks), somewhere between Amerika and The Great Wall of China. It ends, of course, in a trial.
