Merde Happens is the third book in Clarke’s Merde series about Englishman Paul West’s attempts to live with an alien race: the French. The first two, A Year in the Merde and In the Merde for Love, were wonderfully hilarious as West encountered the absurdities of French language, bureaucracy, and women. In Merde Happens, Paul goes to America as a consultant for the British Tourist Authority. His job is to oversee a series of tourist events and try to help Britain win a competition to be the World Tourist Capital. On his trip, Paul realizes that most of the events’ organization has been outsourced to India and that he is really overseeing a series of catastrophes waiting to happen.
I read Clarke’s books for two reasons. First, there’s the absurdity factor. I love authors who take strange circumstances and create absurd situations and let them develop into side-splitting scenarios, and Clarke has a knack for piling merde on West until everything spins out of control. Second (and this ties into the first reason I read Clarke), is that Clarke is very talented at highlighting the absurdities of culture. I know that every culture’s rules and habits make sense to the members of that culture, but when you’re an outsider like Paul, a lot of things seem downright odd.
But I’m starting to think that Clarke needs to move on. While I sympathized with Paul as he dealt with a series of incompetents and weasels, it’s that I think the character has lived its useful life. Paul has stayed remarkably naive and seems to have learned nothing about dealing with foreign cultures after his years in France. He’s not a good communicator. I found that I kept getting frustrated with Paul’s inability to explain himself to people. And I particularly got fed up with Alexa, Paul’s girlfriend, because she never gave him the opportunity to really explain himself. Not that I’m really comparing this novel with Othello, but I think that the plot problems in both could have been averted if all the characters had attended group therapy sessions.
The other thing that annoyed me about this book is that I kept waiting for Clarke to treat American culture the same way he treated French culture. I mean, he had a bit of a go at our out-sized restaurant meals, our tendency to sue instead of dealing with accidents, and such. But I don’t think Clarke took full advantage of his setting. Perhaps it’s because, as far as I know, he hasn’t lived in the United States or been over here as long as he’s been in France and England and doesn’t really know us.
While I enjoyed parts of this book, I found it to be disappointing over all. But I still want to get my hands on Talk to the Snail, because I think it has great potential to be very funny.