THE GLASS GUITAR

A munitions factory engineer sabotages some fighter planes and runs for the border with like-minded friends in Riggan’s novel set primarily in Texas.

Walter Woodrow Pillow, or Wally, works at the aptly named Fort Worth General Dynamics Bomber Factory, where he is an engineer designing planes, more specifically bombers. The latest, greatest creation is the supersonic F-111 fighter-bomber, a true marvel. Wally, though, has his reservations about these killing machines. It’s the mid-1960s, and he’s not a fan of napalm, Agent Orange, and the whole military-industrial complex. He is beginning to feel guilty and hypocritical about his role in warfare, and no one at work understands him except his lover, Jasmine. (“The planes, which he had once loved, seemed to him somehow malevolent as if each was an evil will observing its own creation.”) After some rather ingenious sabotage with Milk Duds, Wally’s convinced he has rendered the bombers largely useless, and he grabs his guitar, jumps in his car, and flees town singing Bob Dylan songs. The authorities will be after him soon, and he must race to Mexico. Along the way, Wally joins with other kindred spirits who are trying to do good, and they build a DaVinci-style flying machine. They need to somehow fly the contraption to Mazatlan before the authorities catch up with them. Riggan’s buoyant novel starts out with a strong anti-war and social commentary angle, but it also has inventive fantasy elements that propel the novel. The characters have believable, sometimes difficult histories, and seeing them fly with quetzals and swim with dolphins is delightful. The absurd and fantastical elements, however, can be hard to follow, and there are moments that move so fast that credulity is strained. It’s a unique take on an anti-war novel, but one that does not always successfully blend its many disparate elements.

A lively fantasy novel with a positive message that goes on wild, sometimes-confounding tangents.