A storm in the Everglades

FOR those who have already read Carl Hiaasen, is enough to say that Stormy Weather is another of his inspiring southern Florida satires, a wild and wacky tale fuelled by black humour, off centre dialogue and a cast of eccentrics worthy of the funniest funny farm. ,For those who have not come across such volumes as Skin Tight, Strip Tease or the brilliantly absurd and absurdly brilliant Double Whammy, allow me to make the necessary introductions.

Hiaasen, a Floridian native son, works for the Miami Herald newspaper as an investigative reporter and metropolitan columnist. Appalled at the despoliation of the state by rapacious developers and avid conmen, he has been fighting the good fight in print for a number of years, blowing the whistle on a variety of scams, and highlighting the damage being done to the environment by entrepreneurs motivated solely by the pursuit of the almighty buck. He is also youngish, good looking, and has magnificent teeth.

In his novels he has made fun of such topics as cosmetic surgery, the depredations caused by philistine tourists, ecological devastation, the destruction of animal life, and the banalities of theme parks and Disneyland rip offs. Granted, his righteous anger often leads him to go over the top, but, like the cyclones that sometimes exhibit nature's ire, there is a certain majesty to his gross exaggeration. And he can also be very funny.

Stormy Weather starts off with a hurricane the one that lays waste to Dade County on a certain August 24th. We are immediately reintroduced to Clinton Tyree, alias Skink, who was once the Governor of Florida but is now a wild man, living rough and existing on "road kills" (animals killed by traffic) which he eagerly collects and eats. To go into how he went from such an exalted state to such a low one would take up too much space - suffice to say that he has featured in most of Hiaasen's previous books and is an inspired creation. Around him revolves a crowd of misfits, simpletons, incompetent villains, would be innocents and increasingly outrageous caricatures.

To try to summarise the plot of Stormy Weather would be futile, for it whirls about like a bat loose in daylight. In an anarchic world such as Hiaasen's, the absurd becomes logical, and vice versa one accepts bizarre behaviour as the norm because the norm itself has been turned upside down.

The aftermath of the hurricane, then, is an apt setting for the action. The cast includes the freed animal inhabitants of a wildlife import business, among them a lion, three cougars, a gelded Cape buffalo, two Kodiak bears, and 88 rhesus monkeys a pair of scam artists, the hard edged temptress Edie Marsh and the facially challenged Snapper, who set up and fail disastrously to carry out various cons the estate agent Tony Torres, who ends up crucified on a television dish the crooked building inspector, Avila, saved from a similar fate by the timely intervention of one of the wandering bears; a visiting tourist, Max Lamb, who is kidnapped by the ever more spaced out Skink; and Max's new bride, the delectable Bonnie, who is wooed and won by Augustine, made wealthy by being the only survivor of a plane crash and whose hobby is juggling with human skulls.

Needless to say, the pace is feverish, and many deviant and Monty Pythonesque satellites circulate about the major ones. For instance, there is the septuagenarian Levon Stichler, who sets out to murder the already crucified Torres, and ends up being sent into permanent trauma by a pair of likely whores; and the hunter, Keith Higstrom, who comes to grief when he spots the Cape buffalo in his neighbour's back garden, goes out to shoot it and misses.

Stormy Weather is a compendium of frenetic posturing, outre behaviour and good humoured bad taste. It is also revoltingly funny. Perhaps it is a tad too long, but overall, one can't get too much of Hiaasen's bawdy inventiveness and skewered view of the human condition. I certainly can't.