Changes

It's hard to know where to start in reviewing Ned Beauman's Booker long-listed ''The Teleportation Accident''. Reading it, you feel like the parent of an ADHD-suffering child. At times it is lovable, brilliant and entertaining, at others you just want to reach for the Ritalin and tell it to sit in a corner quietly while it composes itself. A clue to both the brilliance and frustration of Beauman is in the vast range of writers to whom he has been compared in both this and his first novel [[Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman|Boxer, Beetle]]. There are hints of people as wide ranging as [[:Category:David Mitchell|David Mitchell]], [[:Category:P G Wodehouse|P G Wodehouse]], [[:Category:Douglas Adams|Douglas Adams]], Raymond Chandler even [[:Category:Angela Carter|Angela Carter]] to name just a few. Beauman takes a huge range of styles and genres and pushes them and bends them often to glorious effect, but it can be a challenge keeping up with him at times.

Set mainly in the pre-World War 2 period, initially in Germany but moving to LA via Paris, Egon Loeser is a theatre set designer obsessed with the history of a teleportation device invented in the 1600s by an Italian set designer which failed spectacularly. Loeser is also self-pitying and sex-starved - the latter presumably affected by the former. Beauman's point is that there is repetition in events through time that is largely unaffected by the period in which it is set, and events can usually traced back to lust for a girl. There are constant references to Brecht throughout whose emphasis was on acknowledging that actors were part of a show rather than reality, and this is not a coincidence. Situations repeat and almost every seemingly irrelevant strand ultimately pays off later in the book. It's hugely clever but not always an easy read as the reader will doubtless feel hopelessly lost at various points in the story.