Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Sun-drenched beaches. Curvy young brown-skinned women dancing in grass skirts. Gentle, easy-going villagers gliding through the sea in hand-hewn canoes. If this is your image of a South Sea island, you can forget about it. That’s not what you’ll find on Christopher Moore’s madcap romp through Micronesia, Island of the Sequined Love Nun. And don’t expect the story to make any sense, either. Moore is addicted to the supernatural as well as the absurd in general. He positively glories in deus ex machina solutions to the jams his characters encounter. And this novel about a South Pacific adventure features not one such solution but several. But the excuse for all this silliness is simple. It’s funny, at least much of the time.
An adventure he could never have imagined
So, here we have hapless young Tucker Case. He’s a pilot who flies a pink Learjet out of Dallas for one Mary Jean Dobbins, “the matriarch of pyramid makeup sales.” Now, Tucker’s great weakness—one among many—is that he can’t resist any opportunity to charm into bed every pretty young woman who crosses his path. And one such incident is his undoing. Flying drunk while making love to a prostitute in the cockpit of Mary Jean’s Learjet, he crashes the $2.4 million aircraft. And in the process, he inflicts a grievous wound on his penis, making it inoperable for further such adventures for the foreseeable future. But this sets him up for a South Sea adventure the likes of which he could never have imagined.
Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore (1997) 336 pages ★★★☆☆
A job that’s too good to be true
Now the plot thickens. Lying immobile in a hospital bed, Tucker receives a job offer from Dr. Sebastian Curtis, a missionary doctor in the South Pacific. He has a Learjet—a $2.6 million Learjet 45! for a missionary!—and he needs Tucker to fly it in and out of Alualu. For a salary of $3,900 a week. A missionary! Now, of course, any level-headed man with an ounce of sense would smell a rat in this offer. But Tucker Case has no alternative. The FAA, the FBI, the police, and one wounded and outraged prostitute are all out to get him. So, it’s off to the South Seas and a job that, of course, is too good to be true.
A cargo cult worships the Sky Priestess and the Sorcerer
This story is nuts enough even before Tucker gets to Alualu. Just for starters, it involved an alcoholic former Peace Corps volunteer on Truk who edits and publishes the local newspaper and a transvestite Filipino small boat navigator with a talking fruit bat for a pet. But then the tale goes wildly off the rails. On the island at last, we meet Dr. Curtis (the “Sorcerer” to the islanders) and his seductive wife, Beth (the “Sky Priestess”). They minister to a 100-year-old cannibal and the 342 members of the Alualu cargo cult, which worships a World War II American pilot with a Brooklyn accent and his bomber. Yes, the bomber is called the Sky Priestess, and Beth is the reincarnation of the sexy lady painted on its nose. And everyone is involved in the missionaries’ business, which involves Japanese guards toting submachine guns and a mysterious ceremony led by the Sky Priestess. Somehow, it works. And it’s funny—if you like that sort of thing.
About the author
Christoper Moore is the author of eighteen comic fantasy novels. He was born in Ohio in 1967 and raised in the state, attending Ohio State University. He moved to California when he was 19 years old and lived on the Central Coast until 2003, when he moved to Hawaii. Moore now lives in San Francisco.
For related reading
You’ll find lots of comic antics at My 10 favorite funny novels.
If your taste runs more toward serious fiction, you might enjoy my reviews of Top 10 great popular novels and 20 most enlightening historical novels.
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
