Word: enu
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Dates: during 1982-1982
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Death has no sting. It is the custom for an Enu to go out of sight to die-conveniently underground. From sheer boredom the inhabitants invent their wars, like board games. They do not even care if they win. Winning can be a problem. "Win a war and you have to make the enemy do your will," the Enu Defense Minister complains. "What will? We have no will. We even lack a will to live. We no longer need...
...Enu entropy is contagious. After a while Orlando is confessing his own slavish wish for a nesting birdbrain to take over: "I experience this vacuum just a few inches above my head. This empty space of unknowing...
...unforgivable sin in any Lind world is logic. Are the Enu a race of mutants-survivors of a nuclear bomb experiment? Or are they the missing link-a throwback to the age of reptiles? Is the island paradise or purgatory? At different times, Lind has it both ways. Consistency, as he sees it, is the hobgoblin of those without other hobgoblins...
...only real drama on the Enu island is leaving it, and even that may not count. Orlando decides to return to London because it really does not matter whether he leaves or not. His companions decide to stay for the same reason. So the Lind anti-hero trudges on-a pilgrim making no progress, a permanent refugee moving from one no man's land to another. Bring on the next clowns! Bring on the next cannibals...
Lind is nothing if not uneven. Weirdness follows weirdness, vision succeeds vision, sometimes worthy of a Hebrew prophet, sometimes no more than a gag-writer's whimsy. But Travels to the Enu adds up to far more than a tour de force. It takes true stamina to be so profoundly lost. After all these years on the road, Lind is no more bitter and no less funny than when he started, an impressive feat given the course of history in the meantime. His mind may swarm with hoofed and steaming demons like a phantasmagoric painting by Pieter Bruegel...