I mentioned in a review of Olsen's earlier Time Famine that the 21st Century is his Yoknapatawpha County. Dickens and Faulkner in the same breath set a high standard. But Olsen sets his challenges very high indeed.

     Freaknest is the third novel in what is not a series in the familiar sense of core characters in an ever-evolving network of closely-related plots. Very much in a Faulknerian sense, however, it is a new penetration of a defined territory, the England and America of the late first quarter of the 21st Century. (Later volumes might reach other parts of the globe.) While Time Famine, the second volume, stayed in the American West (past and future, with a sortie to the Moon), Freaknest returns to the electronic post-monarchy neo-Punk England of the first novel, Tonguing the Zeitgeist. Put much too simply, that first novel focused on the political cooptation of rock music. Except incidentally, Freaknest has nothing further to do with that.

     It has to do with the political cooptation of science, the biomedical in particular. I will say barely more about the plot than that it concerns a group of feral children found in isolation rooms in the house of Dr. Jarndyce Mizzle-Sluggbury, who has been experimenting on them in the attempt to "rewire" their nervous systems, and with the use of "nanobots" (submicroscopic robots) transferring to the children the memories of the cryogenically preserved whose bank accounts have zeroed out, and with them their frozen remains. The children, themselves transferred for study to the Aiwa-Benz Neural Orientation & Maturation Assessment Lab (ABNORMAL), are treated as guinea pigs by all but one sympathetic aide, who helps them escape into a picaresque chase through the outlaw East End, until everyone comes to no good end.

     My own taste is appreciative yet suspect of thrillers, especially when the chase is on, because so much exploration of milieu (which the novel is really about) gets short shrift in the lickety-split keep-it-moving; the death traps are obviously not going to be fatal when there are still 100 - 50 - 20 pages left to turn; the last-minute rescues vary the old deus ex machina more or less mechanically; and imaginative revelation, not to mention character development, get swamped by the velocity of plot speed. I found the second half of Freaknest succumbing to this suction into the black hole of story annihilation. To this extent the plot-action of the last hundred pages disappoints, leaving the novel a secondary prop to the edifice of which the earlier Time Famine is clearly the major structure. My second comment about the plot, however, is: it doesn't matter.

     Plots are not what make Lance Olsen novels fascinating (although they never sit still, and they never bore). You don't read Olsen for plot; you read him for the sheer pleasure of reading him. Pick any sentence at random. This one is from p. 144. Olsen writes shorter as well as longer sentences, depending. This one is in the chase I referred to, here through the literal London underground, the tube. Tris, Rykki, Zivv, and Oran are the re-wired feral kids at the heart of the novel. The "cultists" are Cat Cultists; not friendly dudes at all.

Tris dropped into a body ball which a cultist in the lead tumbled over into a clique of generally-hacked-
off-at-the-universe-particularly-when-it-was-a-caucasian-
universe ski-capped tall black teens from probably a Watusian gene pool who didn't so much rise as discharge from their sitting positions into a thunderstorm of ill-will and switchblades while Rykki effected something approximating a power dive she'd once seen in an old Esther Williams vid off a nearby fridgelette head-first into the exact same groin region of the cult's commander-in-chief as Zivv had punted earlier, sending the guy into an immediate catatonic horizontal rictus as his mates came up heartwrenchingly short when confronted by the towering black dudes wielding what seemed to be machetes ... which gave Oran plenty of time to shake off his fall and Rykki to scrabble off the ringleader and Tris to compute what'd just happened, what the appropriate responses might be to what'd just happened, and what they should all do about it, which was to decamp as fast as possible by throwing themselves into the congregation of the raggedy-assed down-and-outers around them who'd by now taken an abiding interest in what was going on ...

A stray intrepid pedestrian decked out in respirator, goggles, rubber gloves, rubber mackintosh over Klub Med-tartan kilt, and LaCrosse biohazard boots recommended by the World Health Organization shot out of a newsagent's, jogged down the pavement, and darted into a Chinese bank past the deserted shrine where a weak feather of smoke rose from a smoldering pile of incense and paper money before a plaster likeness of the Great Helmsman himself.

The Imperial Mallmaze, its name a bit of a laff at the exiled royal family, started as a group of shops on a side street in Noneatin in the late nineties but, under the auspices of the Virgin-Disney people (under the auspices of the Klub Med people, under the auspices of the Diacomm people), cleaved, replicated, and grew like some sort of dream-time steel-and-glass transmutation, both above ground and below, spreading westward into Birmingham, chewing away at the city through the decades till it more or less replaced the city, supplanting some of the less economically solvent natives therein, while also creating a home for lots more, part office complex and part bazaar, part governcorp housing project and part conglomeration of innumerable faddish boutiques ... a stunted Sherwood Forest bisected by a stream rushing with holographic water (floating chessboards, pointillist fruit, vintage psychedelic stripes and paisleys) ... full-scale BosniaLand theme park highlighted with make-believe mortar attacks and ethnic-cleansing festivals ... manmade lake with Yellow Submarine rides ... tennis courts ... football fields ... even this forgery of a little corner of the Swiss Alps complete with snow and bunny slopes for the wannabe skiers in the family ... everything tumbling together into a clean, Brinks-Force-
patrolled reverse Revolutionary War in pursuit of Britain's culturally receding hairline ... a one-roof haven away from the snipers and pedophiles, gangs and goofballs, carbon dioxide and diabolic ultraviolet gene-scrambling radiation outside ... except, well, maybe for that teeny-tiny outbreak of humidifier lung over by what had once been the University of Aston, result of micro-organisms, molds, and spores building up in the recirculated air, tissue damage same as that from asbestos, but. ..WHY TAKE A CHANCE? the advertisements said, LOSE YOURSELF IN THE MAZE ...
      The idea caught on. Soon Imperial Mallmazes sprung up across Norwitch and Plymuff, Holyhead and Scarsburrow. And the Brits loved them. Pizza Hut called, and they came. McLenin knocked, and they answered. In droves. Thousands of them, millions, mobbing the imitation public squares and Roman-pillared passageways, packing rides, squashing into stores, butting, shoving, jostling toward the merchandise and the jubilance, queues be damned, hajis to the Promised Land.

     The details of Olsen's world are as inexhaustible as his linguistic resources. His tongue keeps inventing them, without let-up, without let-down: exuberant, shrewd, hilarious, illuminating. Dystopian satire is not my cup of choice; but never has it been such fun.

     Which is quite an achievement. Neither Orwell nor Huxley has projected so hopeless a world – yet such a lively wonder ... until it eats you, inside out.