Tourists

C. Stephen Gray is Director of Information Services, Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

Writing something that most people will find comic isn’t easy. Indeed, you might say that humor is a funny thing; it doesn’t take much to stray from one man’s comedy to another’s fatuity. These truisms notwithstanding, Richard B. Wright’s Tourists can be described as a genuinely funny novel.

The novel is reminiscent of Vonnegut’s Mother Night. But, whereas Vonnegut’s jailhouse reminiscence is played upon the rather large canvas of World War II and urban America, Wright’s hero narrates the tale of his crimes from the rather more ridiculous locale of a provincial Mexican place of detention — the scene of his crimes being a somewhat tawdry tourist trap on the resort island of Cozumel.

Indeed, it is not simply the unlikely geography that undercuts the confession of Philip Bannister: Wright’s novel is pervaded by an inescapable atmosphere of quiet insanity, and the first-person narrator, far from being omniscient, is often just as disoriented as the reader, who struggles along with him as he gradually unveils the truth. Wright describes Tourists as “a witty novel of suspense”; it is often witty, but never suspenseful. After the introductory chapter’s exposition of the setting, narrator, and part of the plot, there can be no doubt in the reader’s mind that Philip Bannister is crazy, or close enough to insanity that anything he says must be taken with many grains of salt. The character’s chief failing would seem to be his inability to face up to his many inadequacies. He blusters on with his WASPish facade in the face of his wife’s apparent nymphomania, his sexual diffidence, and the puerile behavior of two of his victims, Ted and Corky Hacker — ugly Americans both.

If Tourists has a fault, perhaps it is in the area of plot. There is excellent dialogue and wildly incongruous characterization, but these materials are spread pretty thinly over too few episodes. I would have liked to see a little more invention on Wright’s part, to see the author place these comic characters into more situations; I would have liked the book to be longer. But to wish there had been more is a pretty fair recommendation for any book these days. Tourists is a pleasure to read and a fine addition to Wright’s other works.