John Harding One Big Damn Puzzler

One Big Damn Puzzler

John Harding

Harper, Apr 2007, $14.95

On a remote South Pacific island, most of the inhabitants have lost one or both limbs due to landmines left by the American military years ago. In that environs, American attorney William Hardt arrives to coordinate compensation for those native victims of the military's neglect. To his shock they all speak English, albeit the King's English not the Americanized version.

However, he meets a strange bunch of locals starting with the seemingly articulate Managua, who plans to translate Hamlet into island pidgin. He finds more oddities as parents preferring daughter dress their sons in female garb, pigs running loose owning the island because they are descendents of the British colonization, and the use by apparently everyone of the hallucinogenic "kassa". However, the most stunning thing of all remains the all natural giant toilet bowl where everyone goes to take a communal poop. Still Hardt completes the mission though he has no concept of what he wrought when the serpent reentered paradise.

Nothing is sacred as John Harding acerbically rips the globalization of American military-big business exploitation of the world. The story line is filled with jabs, hooks, and crosses including several below the belt as ONE BIG DAMN PUZZLER satirizes everything from the misuse of the 9/11 tragedy to the "corporacizing" war fighting to the growing of big government by those claiming small government goals to the illusion of a giant toilet bowl beach dump where anyone can pollute with all natural rubbish. The natives sum up this humorous often gross satire by knowing the Brits gave them Shakespeare while the Americans left guns, landmines, and lawsuits.