Rating: - Edson's stab at novel-length absurdity
Russell Edson is his own writer, to be sure. Probably the only creature that comes anywhere close to doing what he does is James Tate, who provides an insightful blurb on the back of this book about the ability of Edson to create characters in a repetitive purgatory, which is probably one of the best ways to introduce a primary Edson theme. Edson's characters often have to deal with highly absurd situations which they can live with or rail against--giving birth to frogs through their ears, having to eat ape for dinner every night, studying sheep in test tubes, and other such matters.

The basic situation of _The Song of Percival Peacock_ does not seem so absurd at first: Percival Peacock, nephew to the late Lord Peacock, has inherited the estate and so arrives only to find that a chair is missing from the inventory. In looking for the missing chair, though, the absurdity of things immediately start presenting themselves: the maid, for example, a sumo-shaped elderly woman who has an unusual treatment for rheumatism involving mayonnaise, was the object of lust for the late Peacock until the chair she put her things on when undressing superseded her for the Lord's undulations. The servants do not consider themselves servants at all but masters of the household, when not being told what to do by the actual Peacock air, who is a dwarf who seems to lurk somewhere in the basement. That this whole novel, just like many of Edson's poems, occurs solely in dialogue doesn't help matters as we have accidental sexual liaisons, fetishes and superficiality in its most extreme.

Despite Tate's assessment of Edson's characters suffering in a repetitive purgatory, some trains of dialogue become a little too redundant in the course of the 144 pages of this book. Percival himself is perhaps a little too blue blood at times, insisting on proper etiquette too often to sustain the strings of dialogue, though I will admit that his transparency at the beginning does help to set up the drastic changes he takes on later. But there are a lot of pleasures one can take here that can also be taken in Edson's poetic works--a very unstable sense of where things should be, and the constantly changing relationships that make his work very dream-like, where even absurdity has a home that we sympathize with or react to as we would the 'reality' of our waking lives.

Russell Edson met a severe challenge in pulling together a novel that could sustain the intensity of his much more brief poems. Though the work lags at times and doesn't constantly challenge, overall it is a fine attempt and presents many very memorable moments.