The Last of the Dream People by Alice Ann Parker

I was fascinated by the idea of a novel written about an encounter with the Senoi dreamers of Malaysia. And Alice Ann Parker is an acclaimed psychic from Hawaii, so it promised to be great good fun. The Senoi are a "tribe" that use dream interpretation as an integral part of their lives, guiding and transforming them. The fictional S'norra created by Alice Ann Parker are based on research she's done on the Senoi and oddly enough that part of the book, the mysterious and paranormal part, was the most lifelike and realistic. Here she is on solid ground and knows her stuff.

What I had trouble with was our hero, Captain Kilty Stewart, who bumbles through his adventures in the jungle like a sort of good-natured Jimmy Stewart character. His unsophisticated character sets a jolly tone that seems out of place in this complex dream world. He's kind of sexist, kind of racist, kind of dumb, just yer average joe that says "what the hey" from time to time - not someone you feel like having as your narrator. And then on top of it all he switches from being the narrator to suddenly writing in a journal, a strange mechanism that seems unnecessary since nothing essentially has changed in the tone of the book but suddenly we are told that this bit we are reading is a journal, not the book anymore. Uh huh, so what? It is a detail that makes a tiny bit of sense at the end of the story, but could have been handled better. Made it was hard to suspend my disbelief.

I never did get caught up in the drama, finding myself annoyed by the action-adventure nature of the plot when the tales of dream interpretation were so much more fun. Kilty is told to go back to dreams that haunt him, to ask for gifts in his dreams and interesting things like that which he has no trouble accepting as exercises in dreamwork. The S'norra attitude to death and the afterlife were also interesting things to learn, very happy and comforting. All this makes me want read some of the books Parker used in her research. But the story of Captain Kilty was a bit too Hollywood in its structure and turned a very good idea into a light bit of summer reading, something it was easy to put down from time to time before turning on the t.v.

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