The Road to Mars

As another year of commitment to expanding my reading horizons drew to a close, I was in the mood for something light - and a sci-fi comedy about comedy itself by one of comedy's greats seemed like a safe bet. I wasn't really aware of Eric Idle as a novelist, but was certainly familiar with his work as a writer, and as he was responsible for a lot of the more memorable moments in Monty Python's rather mixed history, I went into The Road to Mars with reasonably high expectations.

The Road to Mars operates on three levels. Most of all, it is a space-bound adventure reminiscent of the classic science fiction of the 50s and 60s, following two stand-up comedians as they venture through the Solar System trying to make a name for themselves but ultimately becoming embroiled in an interplanetary terrorist plot. They encounter a host of bizarre characters on the way and, like a lot of good sci-fi, the world(s) that develop around them serve to reflect satirically back on our own. At the same time, Idle uses the duo's android secretary Carlton as a mouthpiece to expound on his own theories on comedy's place in human nature - what actually counts as comedy, why we feel the need to laugh, and whether we should at all - as the robot breaks unprecedented ground by attempting to understand emotion in an academic thesis. The third strand follows a scholar decades after the main events who discovers Carlton's manuscript and attempts to pass it off as his own.

As much as the main plot is compelling, Carlton's theories are genuinely profound and the scholar's journey from adaptation to outright plagiarism is amusing to anyone who has written an essay, the result is a book that feels somehow both bloated and incomplete. Idle crams an awful lot of characters into just over 300 pages, some of them more memorable than others but all with detailed motivations, to the extent that the actual plot is a lot more complicated than it needed to be, and hard to follow at times; the ending also feels rushed and doesn't really do the build-up justice. The passages set further on in the future seemed almost like an afterthought, and a tougher editing process might have removed them altogether. But while the writing lacked the thick-and-fast humour of the likes of Life of Brian, there were still a lot of enjoyable set pieces and one-liners to be found, and as a sci-fi reader it was fun to take in a comedic reinterpretation of the cornerstones of the genre (Asimov, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke spring most immediately to mind) by a writer who is clearly a fan himself.

But really these points pale into insignificance when taken alongside Idle's dissertation on comedy that runs in and out of the plot proper. He goes deep - from discussions on the evolutionary foundations of laughter to cultural variations in comedy, by way of why people end up becoming comedians and why society feels a need for them. There are some moments that give real pause for thought, but best of all is Carlton's "unified theory of comedy" - the idea that, while gravity is the force that allows the universe to exist, by nature it must be counterbalanced by its opposite: levity. Not only does it make sense as a concept, I can't help but feel that a lesser writer would have shied away from actually resolving the robot's search for the answer.

So while The Road to Mars tries to do and be too much at once, it does succeed in a lot of ways, and Idle has to be applauded for that.

4/5

Eric Idle is the second author since I started doing this to perform the song linked to his book - the first being Stephen Hawking with a song by... Eric Idle. Funny how the universe lines up like that.