Priscilla is struggling to make ends meet as a waitress while trying to create the perfect perfume in her spare time. Alobar has a problem: if he displays any signs of aging, his reign as king will come to an end. Pan, though, is coming to terms with the fact that nobody believes in him any more. How these and many other storylines converge and twist around each other, along with many others is one of the joys of Jitterbug Perfume.
Jitterbug Perfume was Tom Robbins’s fourth novel, and possibly his most successful. First published in 1984, it remains a favourite amongst many of his fans.
It’s a lot of fun, too. When I first read this, I couldn’t believe just how much I was laughing out loud at the story. After an astonishing introduction (more on this later) and a globetrotting prologue that introduces us to the modern-day cast, we go back in time to an ancient Bohemia that didn’t really exist (hey, it worked for Shakespeare) and meet Alobar who has just discovered a grey hair. This is particularly worrying because the kings of his land are routinely put to death when they show signs of aging. Despite his best efforts, he is found out and, after a narrow escape, makes a run for it. After some perilous adventures, he meets Kudra, a beautiful young woman who likewise escapes a terrible fate. They have more adventures that lead to them becoming the last disciples/worshippers of Pan and discovering the secret to immortality (it has a lot to do with hot baths).
In the present day, Priscilla finds that her work is floundering until she meets Wiggs Dannyboy, who heads the Last Laugh Foundation, an organization that is searching for the secret to immortality.
I’m going to stop summarizing the story there because it becomes way too convoluted for a mere recount to encompass.
What Jitterbug Perfume is, though, is joyous. There are a lot of stupidly delightful puns within this book and more than a few throwaway gags that return in later pages to be of immense significance to the plot and the characters. There are a lot of scenes and descriptions that are worth reading aloud, and some later parts in the story may be responsible for reducing you to tears.
I’m going to start with the faults in this book, because they won’t take long to get out of the way and are mostly to do with how the book has aged (which is ironic, given its theme about not aging).
It’s not a terribly sexist book, given the number of female characters in it who play major parts, but a lot of them are treated as sex objects or are prized for their decorative qualities. There’s also a lot of casual racism in the book by today’s standards, but it is also an outstandingly progressive novel in regards to race given that it was written in the early 1980s. The characters are also spread quite widely along the sexual spectrum, which is refreshing for the 80s as well, though not uncommon: it’s just that here, there is no really big deal made about it as there was in other books of the time.
There’s also a lot of May-December romances in this book. Alobar and Kudra have a fairly large age gap between them (although Kudra’s first husband was much older than Alobar so she mightn’t have seen it as a bad thing) and Priscilla’s relationship with Wiggs has more than a hint of the creepy about it.
But these are relics of the time it was written, when craggy actors were seen as viable romantic leads to co-stars almost half their age, or when veteran rock stars routinely married supermodels young enough to be their daughters. Robbins can’t help but be victim of a zeitgeist that requires desperate men to declare their virility through the attractiveness and youthfulness of their partner.
Anyway, back to Jitterbug Perfume…
I mentioned the introduction earlier. It’s fantastic: it discusses the history of beets, including their role in history and their part in the development of different peoples. I used it as a monologue in my Drama class the year I first read this book (it’s only a page in length) and it went down a treat. It could be seen as a throwaway gag, but beets crop up (or do they turnip?) all through the story, culminating in a scene where several characters dress up as them in a scene set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans near the climax.
Robbins takes a lot of disparate ideas and mixes them up and makes connections between them in a way that a lot of writers attempt, but very few succeed at. It’s a raunchy novel, as we expected from our North American literary types back then, but it’s a lot more fun than most of them, which is what really attracted me to it when I first read it.
I first read it when I was 17. It had been out for a couple of years by then. I was also starting to go through the throes of what I later realized was an unnecessary amount of angst about the perceived quality of my reading matter (I’ve mentioned this elsewhere in the blog but, long story short, I resolved it a few years later when I realized that I also read a lot more “quality literature” than the people who sneered at my genre choices). Jitterbug Perfume seemed like a way of getting the best of both worlds: it was a fantasy novel, but it was also by a “literary” writer. Astonishingly, very few people around me had even heard of Tom Robbins, so it seemed like a lot of effort was being gone to by me for very little return. It took me several years to make this connection and then give up worrying about it.
Anyway, it became one of my favourites for a couple of years, and one that I returned to frequently. Then, in 1990, I was involved in a production of Romeo And Juliet (I played Mercutio, if you’re interested) and I was engaging in a reread of Jitterbug at the time. The stage manager, an otherwise lovely woman, commented that she was a huge Robbins fan, but that she hadn’t seen this one before. Could she borrow it, please? I was fine with that: we were still in rehearsal and it was going to be a three-week season, after all.
Come the last night and the bumping out of the theatre, I was too exhausted to remember to ask her how she’d enjoyed it, and only casually nodded and expressed my best wishes when she said that she and her husband were moving interstate in a couple of days. It wasn’t until a week or so later that I realised that she had gone, taking my copy of Jitterbug Perfume with her.
I was a little hurt, to be honest, but I shrugged it off as just another casualty of my literary life: it wasn’t the first time that this had happened, after all… and I was sure to find another copy of it somewhere, wasn’t I?
Fast forward to 2019. I have not replaced my copy of Jitterbug Perfume. It remains a novel that I remember having some great memories of, as well as a tinge of sadness that I hadn’t read it in all that time because it was difficult to get a replacement copy of. In the years after 1990 I hadn’t replaced it because there were a ton of great books that I hadn’t read that I had gotten and I had started to make careful choices when I bought books largely because I had become a husband and father and didn’t feel like I had the same amounts of disposable income that I did when I was younger.
At any rate, I found myself at a secondhand book sale in Fremantle. I’m leafing through the selection of $2 novels arrayed on a table and in between the brittle Penguins from the 1950s and ‘60s and the blockbuster family sagas from the ‘70s and ‘80s I find a copy of Jitterbug Perfume. It’s not in the best condition, having a cracked spine, a bit of water damage and some signs of having been used as a coaster at some point, but I instantly add it to the pile of books that I’m going to buy.
When I get home, I add it to my “To Be Read” pile… which eventually becomes my “Read” pile. I breathe a sigh of relief because it’s still brilliant. I cut and apply a sheet of Contact to the binding to protect it for further rereads and shelve it in my library.
It’s back where it belongs.
But the story doesn’t end there: when I checked the publication date of this copy, I discovered that this particular edition was published in May of 1990… which was when I had “loaned” my original copy to the errant stage manager.
This was when I half-expected Rod Serling to walk in front of me and address a camera with a short soliloquy about how destiny works in unexpected ways in The Twilight Zone. I knew that it was a pretty cool coincidence and nothing more – look, if I was writing a novel about my life, I’d leave that part out as being twee and trite – but it did fill me with a bit of a glow and it does make a pretty cool way to close out a story, and it does have echoes with the conclusion of Alobar and Priscilla’s stories, but without the beets.
You can find out more about Tom Robbins at http://www.authorsroad.com/TomRobbins.html
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