Laszlo's Millions
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Laszlo's Millions is a hilarious, mad picture of London in the 1970's as seen by Tom Bloch, a drug-fuelled spy for the notorious BOSS, Apartheid's evil secret police...who is also likely to inherit several millions from the lover of his dead grandmother Hazel. We learn how she met and fell in love with the priapic Count Laszlo Mindchyck, the Laszlo of the title, only to run away into the mists of war when bullied and tormented by his dreadful offspring. And how, many years later, she drops dead when informed that she is his heir…leaving Tom, her heir, likely to inherit everything. But there are conditions! The book is a weaving of stories, each bursting with life-loving characters, each determined to make Tom's life even more complicated than it is. We visit the parents of Tom’s schizophrenic lover Mona, and discover what made her mad. The journey from Johannesburg and the Apartheid dystopia brings us the character of the Brigadier, who is now in charge of the BOSS spies in London. BOSS – the feared Bureau of State Security, the South African intelligence service, charged with identifying and terminating anti-Apartheid activists. Tom’s employers. Whose headquarters is in the Gents’ toilet at Sloane Square. The novel takes shape eventually with Tom’s dreadful dilemma: should he abandon all his principles, assume a three-piece suit and thus win the inheritance from Laszlo? He has nine months to convince a panel of “Jurors” that he is a fit and responsible person to handle Laszlo’s Millions. Which means selling out, abandoning his best friend Pieter, and heading into history…Zoom. In style, the writing is Tom Sharpe meets Monty Python via Kurt Vonnegut and a dash of Franz Kafka. Hilary Mantel described Elkon’s first novel as ‘fairly waltzing the reader along…the prose is full of energy and humour and beneath the playfulness there is an undertow of pain…’ (Daily Telegraph). This book takes off into territory as delightful, as charming, and far more challenging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elkon's sly, riotous romp is so busy being a farce, a political thriller, a coming-of-age novel and a satire of the '60s counterculture that it runs out of steam about halfway through. Tom Bloch, a South African hippie, student activist and protagonist of Elkon's first novel, Umfaan's Heroes , arrives in London penniless with his new bride, Mona, who is mentally disturbed after taking an overdose of LSD. When Tom's grandmother Hazel drops dead upon learning that she has inherited millions from a long-ago lover, a Hungarian count afflicted with ``Rampant Priapism,'' Tom stands to inherit her fortune if he proves himself fit and responsible in the nine months before his 21st birthday in 1970. Although he gets a respectable job to revamp his image, things go awry: Mona, who may be the person murdering his friends, abandons him; Julia, Tom's lesbian roommate and sometime lover, apparently dies in a suicide pact; and Tom is recruited by South Africa's Secret Service to illegally sell plutonium to Rhodesia, a scheme he intends to expose. Allergic to hypocrisy and pretense, Elkon takes deadly satiric aim at hippiedom, academia, apartheid, obtuse parents and preening adolescents through most of this in a zany lark of a novel.