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The Wooden Sea
Jonathan Carroll
Gollancz, hardback, 247 pages, £16.99
Review by Mike Don (2001)

Nominally the third book in a loose sequence, but entirely readable as a standalone. Carroll’s approach has a feeling of everyday surrealism about it. It starts simply enough: Frannie McCabe, the narrator, is as down to earth as they come, a police chief in a small American town. But, beginning with the curious case of the three-legged dog, the strangeness factor takes off exponentially. McCabe encounters a sinister Dutch tycoon and his own obnoxious teenage self, spastic time travel jumps, mysterious, sometimes incompetent trickster aliens, alternate futures . . . 

The time manipulating aliens seem to recall Vonnegut’s Tralfamedoreans, but McCabe is no Billy Pilgrim. He’s a cop, with a policeman’s dogged (no pun intended) determination to get to the bottom of the mystery, whatever it takes, whenever it takes him. Doesn’t help that the aliens need him to find something . . . but they don’t know what.

And ultimately, neither does the reader. The unbearably poignant ending not only reveals Carroll to be an author who can swing an emotional sucker punch with the best, but leaves the mystery unresolved. There may be more to The Wooden Sea than meets the eye. Don’t be fooled by the laconic, hard-boiled style.