Book Review: The Incredible Umbrella

Title: The Incredible Umbrella

Author: Marvin Kaye

Date: 1979

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385-14321-4

Length: 218 pages

Quote: “If you could speak our language, you would be a national hero, rather than a patient here.”

J. Adrian Fillmore, frustrated word-nerd and uninspired English teacher, finds a big gaudy umbrella at his favorite junk shop. Paying only a quarter because it won’t open, he takes it home, tinkers with it, and finds that when it does open the umbrella is actually an interdimensional travel device, reading its owners’ brain waves to take them to the alternate world they have in mind. All good fiction, we learn, is the history of a parallel world. Fillmore finds himself bounding through the world of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, consulting Sherlock Holmes for help to understand the umbrella and find its maker, borrowing an ordinary umbrella from Pickwick, dodging Dracula, befriending Frankenstein’s Monster, and being flattened out in Flatland. He meets unpleasant people and has some fast-moving, logic-twisting adventures, but even when things look grim to Fillmore the mash-up of literary motifs is hilarious for the reader. (Neither Fillmore nor the reader expects things to go too badly. Victorian authors made characters like Fillmore suffer, but characters they allowed to die were either much nicer or much nastier.)

If your knowledge of English literature and vocabulary are wide—the wider the better—this book is a gloriously long, lavishly complicated joke; you’ll keep laughing for days, and be able to go back and laugh anew a few years later. I’ve laughed at this book many times. More than most comic fiction it’s worth buying and keeping. Between Flatland and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy it was the funniest piece of science fiction in the English language. (If The Hitchhiker’s Guide had come out a bit later Kaye might have become rich off this book; there is, however, no proof that that’s why Douglas Adams called his depressive robot character Marvin.)

If you’re not into English literature, especially nineteenth century fiction but the whole canon of English literature generally, you’ll miss most of the jokes. You’ll probably think there’s not enough action-adventure and no sex at all, since what this book has to offer in both categories is mostly literary references, and you’ll probably not feel satisfied by this book in any way. Read something else. This preposterous fantasy has both peril and passion in it, and also poetry, music, and philosophy, and even some math and science, but it’s for people who’ve read everything they were told to read at school.