alter Bullitt is a rather selfish and amoral fellow. He earns his living by freelancing for various spy agencies of the U.S. government, and although he's not involved in any dirty wetwork, his specialty is just as devious, deadly and devastating. Walter is an expert in psychoactive substances, natural and lab-born, many of which he samples recreationally himself. He can dose an unsuspecting victim or entire populace and be on the next flight out of town before you can say, "Bad trip, man." But Walter possesses a complex character. Passing for white in a prejudiced society, he
nonetheless shows vast sympathy for his dark-skinned ancestors, manifested most clearly in his vast collection of "race records," shellac 78s of forgotten popular music. He is also witty, convivial and loyal to his friends. Exhibiting at least a few clearly defined ethical limits he will not transgress, Walter is in short a charming rogue.
Walter is pursuing his irresponsible, individualistic lifestyle during the year 1968. But Walter's 1968 is not the timestream with which we are familiar. Here, the Russians ended WWII by nuking Berlin. The majority religion is Gnosticism. There is no such thing as television. Electric
power comes from a Tesla system. Almost all full-blooded African-Americans, those with a certain susceptible heredity, have died in a seemingly engineered plague. President Nixon was assassinated in New Orleans by lone gunner Oswald. And even simple things are strange: Walter expects traffic
lights to run blue, orange, blue.
Several anomalous events intrude into Walter's accustomed egocentric routine almost simultaneously. Ghostly apparitions of a man and a woman begin to haunt his apartment. Two odd "foreign" women, Eulalie and Chlojo, appear in quest of the ghosts. And Walter's bosses force him into a nasty assignment: he must befriend Jim Kennedy, a New York recorddealer and black-sheep brother to RFK, with an eye toward getting at presidential aspirant Bobby and ending his career.
For a time, Walter juggles all these problems fairly competently, even managing to catch a Velvet Underground show or two at Max's Kansas City. (His hectic activities also include drug dealings with a loony New Age self-help program named Personality Dynamos Incorporated.) But eventually everything falls apart. His Washington bosses amp up his current assignment to really distasteful levels, and Walter determines to make one big score with the PDI, then run to Polynesia. But his friends Eulalie and Chlojo precipitate a bloodbath among the cultists, and Walter must flee with Eulalie to a parallel spacetime like nothing he ever imagined. Swiftly after this, the very substance of the two realities begins to unravel, casting the lovers adrift, their destination and even their survival uncertain.
Everything's groovy as Dryco ends
This is the sixth and final book in Womack's acclaimed Dryco series, after Ambient, Terraplane, Elvissey, Heathern and Random Acts of Senseless Violence. But because nine-tenths of the novel takes place in the newly introduced Walter Bullitt universe
next door to the Dryco one, no previous experience is necessary to enjoy this wonderful book. (Although certainly longtime readers will bring more to the events in the dying Dryco universe, and will also enjoy the closing character biographies that dispose of long-running figures from earlier
books.)
What Womack has done here is something special. He has fashioned an homage, a pastiche, a parody that far transcends its original model. Starting with the sub-James-Bond genre of swinging superstud spies a la Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm and Michael Avallone's Ed Noon, Womack
builds a credible, touching and alluring alternate history limned not by expository lumps but by scattered remarks and observations from the first-person narrator. From cliches and surface banalities arises a real work of art. And the voice Womack has fashioned for Walter Bullitt (note
the Steve McQueen reference) is the main attraction of the whole project. There's no better way to get hooked on Womack's prose than to sample some.
"My happy couple [the ghosts] would be there every morning come roostertime. When I'd get up I'd hope Eulalie'd be there too, lurking in the kitchen or parking that cute keister of hers on my sofa. But every morning I was hit with a no-show. Wasn't hard to see she was the kind of cookie you couldn't keep your mitts on for long. ... I'm not one for the mushbowl. ... I can gape at a full moon and the only thing that makes me howl is how utterly groovitudinous it'd be to perambulate over its chickenpox scars. But when I thought of Eulalie I knew considerably more than just the old kielbasa was involved. ..."
In this loopy hipster voice, Womack manages to tell a convoluted, rip-roaring story that says interesting things about love, duty and epistemological uncertainty. Many homages to the work of Philip K. Dick appear, from the scrap of paper labeled "hot dog stand" to the "crack in the sky" that eventually shatters the Dryco continuum. And Walter's ultimate fate resonates with that of the mysterious Man in the High Castle. All in all, this book brings down the curtains on both Walter's universe and the elaborate Dryco construction in grand style.
