Villa Incog­nito Tom Rob­bins
Ban­tam Books 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Dern Foley, pos­ing as a priest, is appre­hended as he attempts to smug­gle illicit nar­cotics from Laos into Los Ange­les. This is far more than a stan­dard drug bust how­ever; Foley and his two com­pa­tri­ots Dickie Gold­wire and Mars Stub­ble­field had until this time been miss­ing and pre­sumed dead since their plane was shot down over Viet­nam twenty-eight years ear­lier. Foley’s case rep­re­sents a pub­lic rela­tions night­mare for the CIA dn U.S. mil­i­tary. What to do with a for­mer POW who decides to stay miss­ing, then turns up years later as a drug smug­gler? The agen­cies scram­ble to find out who Foley is work­ing with, where the drugs came from, and if there are any oth­ers like him still in hiding.

Mean­while, Dickie Gold­wire is brav­ing the mean streets of Bangkok in search of a gui­tar to take back to Villa Incog­nito, the for­mer POWs’ head­quar­ters. Shortly after his return, his fiancé Lisa Ko arrives at the Villa with news of Foley’s arrest. Gold­wire and Stub­ble­field argue about how to pro­ceed and, after a short visit, Lisa Ko returns to her trav­el­ing cir­cus in the U.S. There, she dis­cov­ers that her tanukis, the odd lit­tle east Asian mam­mals which she trains to per­form — and with which she has a bizarre ances­tral con­nec­tion, have escaped in her absence.

Robbins’s sto­ry­telling is far from lin­ear; his nar­ra­tive is a tan­gled web, work­ing roughly from the inside out. This in no way makes for a dis­jointed read­ing expe­ri­ence, but it does trip one up when try­ing to sum­ma­rize the book. Robbins’s writ­ing is delight­fully con­voluded on a smaller scale as well — he twists sen­tences around, going off on brief tan­gents and mak­ing fre­quent asides to the reader. His cast of char­ac­ters is weirdly hilar­i­ous, includ­ing (in addi­tion to those men­tioned above) a Bangkok pros­ti­tute who hap­pens to be work­ing on a degree in com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture, an unem­ployed draftswoman with a clown fetish, an entire town of out-of-work Viet­namese cir­cus per­form­ers, and a Japan­ese animal-god come to earth in more or less human form. Although this is one of Robbins’s most recent nov­els, it’s my first of his; I’ll have to seek out some of his ear­lier books.