THE REINCARNATION OF TOM

Simpson (The Illusionists, 2016) offers a comic novel about the unexpected perils of reincarnation.

Boring, nondescript 31-year-old insurance worker Tom Robinson is searching for a novelty gift for a co-worker’s upcoming birthday when he wanders into a New Age shop. He’s told by its owner that if he utters a certain chant—“daba dee, daba daa” from Eiffel 65’s song “I’m Blue”—at the last moment of his life, he’ll gain the ability to remember that life when he’s reincarnated. He thinks nothing of it, or of the shopkeeper’s prescient warning that such an ability is “not for the faint of heart,” until, shortly afterward, he’s struck by a bus. He barely has time to utter the chant before he dies and begins his next life—as a chicken. His new avian existence initially seems to be as humdrum as his human one: “until a man…came to separate the chickens according to what was to be their life’s work: laying eggs, being a rooster, or becoming Sunday dinner.” To Tom’s surprise, his job is egg-laying. An older chicken, also a former human, advises him to try to enjoy his new existence—but soon enough, Tom gets reincarnated again, first as a cow, then as a pig. Overall, this book is genuinely charming and offbeat combination of Tom Jones and Groundhog Day. As the story goes on, Simpson’s prose adroitly wields deadpan comedy: “Tom was growing tired of being a farm animal. He’d seen the film Babe, but as it turned out there was little accurate representation of daily farm life in that film.” However, the novel also displays surprising pathos and humanity as Tom accumulates friends and enemies and even, improbably, a love interest during his many lives. As he progresses through numerous animal species, he meets an array of other former humans and slowly learns reincarnation’s parameters, which leads to a resolution that manages to bring the story’s events full circle.

A wild ride on a picaresque path to some kind of wisdom.