Mumbo Jumbo

For some, this will be the best book they have ever read. In the blurb for this book it is cited as one of the top 500 books in the Western canon. I know I am an outlier, because the reviews for this are universally positive and yet I have to say it's been the least enjoyable reading experience for quite some time.

It's the kind of book which is studied at universities in post-modernist courses which are great for writing essays about but really aren't a lot of fun to read. The novel is impenetrable, incomprehensible. It feels like it is post-modernist free jazz history of race relations. Some sentences are beautiful, with a rhythm and metre to them, and yet there is no real plot - much of this is incomprehensible nonsense with no chapters having any real connection to each other. For many this will be a work of genius, and it may be the kind of book where people say, 'but you don't get it, or you're not clever enough for this' but ultimately reading should entertain, inform, be an opportunity for reflection and learning and in this novel I had no experience of this, and no emotional connection to anything of it.

The loose plot, is that there is some kind of dance epidemic called Jes Grew and white society (known as the Atonists) are trying to stamp it out. There are some interesting allegories to white culture stealing from other civilisations, the white suppression of Haiti, and the Depression as a response to crushing black culture and some kind of white Knights Templar organisation throughout the ages.

Avoid, unless you need to write an essay or two.