The Magic Kingdom
Author: Stanley Elkin
Rough Price: ~$18 pb via Amazon
Edition: (2000)
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 156478259X
You won’t find Stanley Elkin’s modern-day classic on the shelves of Borders or Angus&Robertson--even the usually infalliable Amazon.com lists it as a ‘rare’ book. Most of Elkin’s novels, including the 1983 Book Critics Circle favourite George Mills, take some effort to find: their confronting choice of content has mainstream readers fleeing in the opposite direction. To locate a copy of The Magic Kingdom, it’s likely you’ll have to trawl the darker recesses of the local library. Me, I nabbed mine in a second-hand Anglesea bookstore, shelved next to my crime-fiction standard James Ellroy. And let me tell you, it was worth all of the six dollars I paid for it.
Twelve-year old Liam Bale has died, finally, after a long illness--the trials and tribulations of which have been intimately reported in England’s tabloids. To stave off his grief, Liam’s father Eddy concieves a plan to help other children in Liam’s position. In the fashion of the Make-A-Wish foundation, (and with the blessing of the Queen herself!) Eddy intends to supervise and sponsor a trip for seven terminally ill children to Disneyland--a contemporary pilgrimage that inspires comparison to the legends of Lourdes, Odysseus, and Orpheus.
Who are these children? Selected by a panel of ‘experts’ comprising a gay nurse, a chaste minder, a Mary Poppins admiring nanny, and a ‘pronostician’, Eddy ends up with his ‘lucky’ seven. There’s a manic Gaucher’s disease who talks in a cockney accent for the press; a tetralogy of Fallot whose heart defect has turned her skin a luminous blue; an eight-year old victim of the fast-aging disease, progeria, who reminisces about the ‘good old days’; a cystic fibrosis, a dysgerminoma, a lymphoblastic leukemia and a big spending osteosarcoma. For them, the wonderland of Mickey Mouse awaits; and lurking there, amongst the rides and parades, the adult horrors of sex, death and--incredibly--love.
It’s a funny book, the humour blacker than most; a tragicomedy that laughs at death and cries for the lunacies of life. Structured, almost, as a bifurcating novel, the tale wanders variously through the characters minds, their pasts, their grim prognosis, unconnecting and interconnecting, sometimes shifting into parenthetical flashbacks, at others predicting the future, racing at break-neck speed through events and places only to pause, lengthily, over some ignored, domestic concern of existence and illness (the cost of milk, the bland leukemic diet, the immortality granted by Madame Tussads...). Elsewhere the tale comes ‘unstuck’ in reality and enters the surreal, limbo-like worlds of the dead and near-dead, where the children’s dreams intersect and parallel in a strata of terminal consciousnesses.
At all times the style--slipping and sliding through time and characters as it does--is exquisitely brilliant; comparing, charily, the budding of Noah Clotch’s cancerous tumours to bracelets of fine pearls; elaborating, extravagantly, on the sexual picadilos of Mary Coddle, the ever-calm, ever-passive, nun-like minder who mitigates her rages and reservations with frequent masturbation. In Elkin’s world even the oxygen-deprived skin of Janet Order has limitless potential for interpretation; the girl radiates fear, shame and power, and controls small boys with boasts of her awesome blueness.
While the subject matter may be alienating and distressing to the more soft-hearted reader, and the complex language may well pose difficulties for others, The Magic Kingdom remains a book that should be read, a book that pits dying children against the manicly cheerful creatures of Disney. So if you’ve the time--or even if you don’t--my advice is to contact your local second-hand book store and see if they can hunt down a copy. As I said: it’s worth it.
Rachel Astruc | 
