Review of Realists, a novel by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller
I didn’t want to finish this book. I didn’t want to say goodbye to my new weird friends, Smokey and Pepper and Shadow and the other Passengers. But Conrad tapped me on the shoulder and looked at me significantly, so I read the last four pages. I was not disappointed and have no regrets.
Realists starts with a series of eventually interlocking stories starring Our Heroes, the Passengers. Each is a gem of wry humor and masterful wordcraft, a vignette of a “normal” person living in a dystopian America where there is no privacy, no safety, and everyone is drugged, all the time, to prevent dreaming: “Get rid of the dreams and make all the nightmares real.”
Then this nightmarish existence takes a screeching left turn in an elevator. The characters converge and suddenly begin a journey already in progress, where the rules are: there are no rules. As their tiny culture evolves, the Passengers are revealed and they come to love one another however and to whatever degree they are each capable.
There is never a moment in Realist where magic and dystopian intrusions are unlikely. Sometimes it‘s not certain which is in play in the moment. Bit characters pop out of their space/time, Chicago moves to Texas, an old lady grows wings and flies away. The local laws of physics are feral and unpredictable, but the Passengers stoically accept whatever comes their way, an essential survival skill in the howling insanity that is their America. When they are unleashed from that reality, including the universal drug, the Passengers dream again, voluptuously, ferociously, with abandon, and their dreams bleed into their waking reality.
In summary, Realists is a road trip in the Twilight Zone, with hints of Groucho, Sartre and the Circus of Dr. Lao. A cameo appearance by a dark goddess and on rare occasions, by little green men, dignify, then destroy any probability of a neat ending with a moral or a take-home message. But none of that is needed, because this is a circular story, as it turns out…
Realists is worth reading and reading again, tucking little slips of paper between the pages to note especially droll remarks and brilliantly turned phrases – to laugh again and again and to cringe at the deeply cynical view of some future America, maybe ours, maybe not. Bishop and Fuller exercise their formidable talents in stagecraft to create each chapter as another brick in a mossy wall that lacks straight lines and right angles altogether. Nonetheless, the tale seems to progress, evolving, drawing the reader along into strangely familiar spaces, driving through the night, evading consensus reality, stopping at rest stops and hot springs and the house of a god, just like the long and storied lives of the authors themselves.
