Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews Read Free Page A

get the ultimate in vox pop input. Eduard is hired by Ob to be his caretaker, responsible for exercising Ob's real body while Ob himself is doing his administrative stuff in Eduard's body. Teresa joins a cult called the Sharetakers whose philosophy is (stop me if you've heard this one) based on the exploitative and abusive leader getting everything he wants and – surprise, surprise – screwing all the cult's women, but particularly Teresa, at every, well, turn.
    That's about the first half of the book, and a very long half it seems. The blurb writer, obviously at a loss as to how to make all this seem rivetingly original, has ignored it, and in despair gone for the plot that commences with the second half. Unknown to all, Ob has been taking some new mind-rotting and body-rotting drug using Eduard's body, then swapping back into his own Charles Atlas-style flesh at the end of the day; indeed, several of Ob's caretakers prior to Eduard's appointment to the post have been effectively disappeared, presumably because their bodies have died as a result of Ob's addiction. Almost too late, Eduard – who's been a bit puzzled by how lousy he's been feeling – discovers what's going on. His revenge on the vile Ob is, however, drastically more effective than he'd anticipated, and Ob dies.
    So Eduard's on the run as a murderer. Old friends Garth and Teresa believe in his innocence and help him, but he's dogged by the implacable Daragon, who refuses to believe that his idol Mordecai Ob could ever have been guilty of anything.
    And so you have it. There's lots of attempts by the good-guy trio to die in place of each other as they hopscotch between their own and others' bodies, to the extent that a couple of times Anderson is moved to notch up the hellish pathos of it all by starting to quote Sidney Carton from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities : "It is a far, far better thing ..." At this stage this reviewer entered a state of paralysis, unable to decide whether to throw the book at the wall or just to fold up in giggles.
    In the main this is all, so far as it goes, competently related (aside from the occasional line like "Jennika flinched as if she had swallowed a thistle whole"), although, with its lack of pacing and narrative drive, there's no excitement at all in the telling. The "so far as it goes" parenthesis is not idly employed, because there are a heck of a lot of places where Hopscotch does not go.
    For a book of this fairly considerable length, part of whose agenda must have been to explore all the ramifications of its premise, there seem some curious omissions. It is possible that there are offhand references that I've forgotten to some of these, in which case please forgive this addled brain, but I was surprised to find nothing about:
    (a) The uses to which physicians could put hopscotching for diagnosis. If a patient's saying "Doc, I gotta pain here but I can't really describe it", what a godsend it'd be if the doctor could briefly swap into the sufferer's body to pinpoint the exact location of the pain and be able to experience directly what it felt like – whether a chest-pain was angina or just indigestion, for example.
    (b) In the book the rich and villainous exploit the hopscotching process however they can, with utter ruthlessness and disregard for the welfare of other people's bodies. Wouldn't the illicit practice emerge among the thrillseekers of discovering what it was like to be murdered, forcibly hopscotching into a victim and then hopscotching back just before death? It'd be the ultimate jolly for the repulsive snuff-movie market, or for those who like getting half-strangled during sex.
    (c) There's quite a lot in the book about hopscotching for sexual purposes – for example, couples making love twice in a row, swapping bodies for the second encounter, or making love with each other while garbed in other people's bodies – but nothing that I can recall about what would surely be the predominantly appealing