The acute angle of the horizon, squeezed between the houses, hurtled toward him. He was running as fast as he could go, and, as he looked, people toppled slowly and fell like ninepins, full length on the pavement, like big cardboard boxes being dropped. As he runs to her bedside his world literally constricts and darkens: But when Chloe falls fatally ill the atmosphere of light and luxury changes. This environmental adaptability is all very well in the first half of the book, when Colin's main preoccupations are his love for Chloe, for Duke Ellington's music, and for the gastronomical delights concocted by his cook. When Colin feels ready to fall in love, doors begin to close 'with the sound of a kiss on a bare shoulder,' and the air turns sultry. If there is a key to the system's inner logic, it is in the environment's response to changes of mood. But Mood Indigo is not an anarchic collection of magic notions what disturbs us from the beginning is a sense of the fantasy's internal coherence: We can't know that laws which govern it, but we're convinced not only of their existence, but of their frightening irreversability. In Vian, on the other hand, the symbolic 'pianocktail,' which allows one to get literally drunk on jazz, is placed in a universe that continually surprises with flowers growing from the pavement, or with neckties that struggle against being tied.

If we find these anomalies disconcerting, it is because, as Jacques Bens points out in his afterward to the French edition, we are used to fairytales where the supernatural of flying carpets or seven-league boots is inserted in an otherwise normal world. The Vian's heroes live unperturbed in a world where broken windows heal themselves, where clouds smell of wild thyme or cinnamon sugar, and where a rectangular bedroom becomes spherical when 'The Mood to Be Wooed' is played. In a brief preface Vian explains that the book's 'material realization consists in projecting reality obliquely and enthusiastically onto another surface which is irregularly corrugated and so distorts everything.'

The metaphor is not inappropriate: though Boris Vian wrote the novel in 1946, the world it created seems more in tune with perceptions at a stoned-soul picnic than with the view from a bistro in post-war Paris. It's a love-story and a fantasy, but it's about as far from A Man with a Maid as grass is from heroin. THE GROVE PRESS label and the Barbarellaesque book jacket could not be more misleading: Mood Indigo will be a disappointment to the whips-and-white-things crowd.

Mood Indigo by Boris Vian