LOVING LITTLE EGYPT

by Thomas McMahon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1986

This comic strip of a novel by the moonlighting scientist and author of McKay's Bees (1979) bears the rather coy disclaimer: ""It is never a good idea to believe a made-up story as if it were the truth."" Fair enough. But why then include so many actual historical figures, doing admittedly apocryphal things, in this otherwise harmless confection. Playing fast and loose with social history, McMahon here celebrates the ""creative vandalism"" of some early telephone ""outlaws,"" led by the scientific prodigy Mourly Void, the feeble-sighted leader of a network of blind and lonely line-tappers. Known among his peers as ""Little Egypt,"" Mourly testifies, in McMahon's gee-whiz-and-golly view, to the exuberance of experimentation in an age of invention. And the author's wholly invented character sets out from his school for the blind to apprentice himself to the despondent and elderly Alexander Graham Bell, the latter's one great discovery long behind him. Bell not only recognizes Mourly's genius, but takes him in as a grandson and helps him develop a scheme to foil Bell's archrival, Thomas Edison, the vain and ruthless wizard of Menlo Park. When the company bearing Bell's name ignores Mourly's well-intentioned demonstration of his ability to subvert the system, the now-legendary tele-bandit enlists his followers, the down-at-the-heels scientist Nikola Tesla, and Edison's equally hapless son, Sparky, in a plot that achieves its sophomoric end. Both Edison and William Randolph Hearst, the famous publisher having vilified Mourly in his papers as a dangerous Red, agree to kiss, quite literally, a few butts. This breathless bit of whimsy also includes cameos by Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller, Einstein, J. Edgar Hoover, and Henry Ford, among others. Here's the past á la Doctorow--the age of electricity in ragtime. Instead of a hidden political agenda, McMahon pads his trivial divertissement with potted lessons in science, none of which we have any obligation to believe.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986

ISBN: 0226561135

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION