Mark Jacobson's Gojiro.
Softback. £8.99. Penguin

As any follower of Japanese 'monster movies' will tell you, Gojiro is the Jap name for that exceptionally huge, fire-breathing, city-stomping lizard, known in the west as Godzilla.

This novel, essentially, is his story - told with staggering wit, from the mean green one's own point of view. Surprisingly, instead of the expected straight-forward adventure story - crazy scientists disturb GZ's sleep-of-ages with atomic tests, sending him off is search of Tokyo's towerblocks to crush underfoot - what we have is a quasi-theological tract on what it is to be Godzilla!

The resulting book is a virtual cosmology in itself, with GZ in the roles of messianic deity, defender of the meek, superhero, movie star, ambassador of the animal kingdom, and generally all things to all people.

In the pages of Gojiro, the green fellow goes on an Altered States head-trip back to the age of dinosaurs to make contact with his primeval self. Gojiro today is a mutant, a creature with enormous brain capacity - able to communicate telepathically with his human friend Komodo, a mysterious orphan Godzilla brought out of a comma.

Gojiro travels to Hollywood, to solve a mystery which as haunted him all his life, and ultimately to confront the genius responsible for his rebirth. It's a journey fraught with dangers and intrigues - and when the green giant is reduced to pocket size by a shrinking potion, the quest to uncover the truth about missing scientists and global catastrophe proves more difficult than anyone could imagine.

There's a quotable line on nearly every page, as the mythology of the great beast is spun around a dark satire of science, the media, eastern philosophies, western culture and much else besides. There's a gem of advice on deal-making in Hollywood: "Speak glibly and carry a bigger dick."

Required reading for those fed up with the formulatic fantasy and SF pulps masquerading as original novels.


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