Cirrus@Austlit

'Newsreels gave way to cartoon rabbits, theatre announcements and featured pictures, the ticker of the projector lighting the way through an empty sky. And there was Siggy, scene after scene, riding elephants and running from lions, laughing and jumping and swinging through the trees, smiling and kissing, wet lips puckered and arms open wide, his beautiful grey face filling the silver screen and dissolving into the white-hot light of the sun. 

'Jozsef Kiss, amateur Hungarian physician and animal trainer, arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1931 with his African travelling companion, an orphaned chimpanzee. That chimpanzee becomes Siggy the Wonder Chimp, Jungle Man s faithful jungle companion, and a bona fide star.

'Wonderful is the story of a movie star monkey and his hapless, drunken partner. Complete with exploding coconuts and chimpanzee antics, it follows the adventures of a man and his animal sidekick as they encounter the strange and dusty landscape of California, agents and starlets, cowboys and elephants, the Depression and fascism, and the onset of the Second World War. It is a comic and sometimes sad emigrant s tale, a story of the invention and reinvention of people and nations, of history and of dreams. Above all, it is a story of loyalty, friendship and love.' (Synopsis)

'James Bloomington is prone to nose bleeds, sweating fits and excessive formality. Very few people find this in any way endearing. His father having disappeared, quite literally, before his second birthday, James has been raised by his mother, Veronica, a woman known and feared for her beauty and her fondness for the STSC-720 N95 line of disposable particulate respirators. Working as a junior editor for legal publishers Sandler and Harris, James has arranged his solitary life according to his own peculiar standards of conduct and, more importantly, order. But when Veronica discovers an apparently homeless man sitting in a city lane who may or may not look like her son in 10 years time, James Bloomington's sense of his own identity is called into question and his life begins to unravel around him. As the relentless summer sun bears down, James is forced to deal with the man in the lane, his hyperactive boss's infatuation for his mother, his own infatuation for his boss's daughter, an amorous, possibly Italian landlady, an aggressive leprechaun, public masturbators, self-improving Nazis, a well-kept hedge, and a mysterious telephone booth that seems to know his every hidden desire.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.