Product Description

In Alaska to film a famous children's book, the crew of a big-bucks Hollywood production company encounters a tribe of people who have had little contact with whites. By the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Reprint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44680 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 533 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Kesey's latest cosmic adventure, set in 21st-century Alaska, finds aging hippies hiding out in a fishing village that is invaded by a film crew. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-- The sleepy little fishing village of Kuinak, Alaska, is transformed into a movie set when a Hollywood production company sails into port. The community, populated by Deaps (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples) and a few adventurers from the Lower 48, is swept up by the glamour and promises of wealth. However, Nick Levertov's motives for choosing this site for filming are more complex than a simple return trip of a native son--and they're not all honorable. This master storyteller weaves a plot around a cast of characters as colorful as the aurora borealis. His writing style is complex and sometimes the story line changes abruptly without transition. The book will appeal to mature readers who can appreciate the humorous and bizarre aspects of the plot.
- Grace Baun, Robert E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
After 25 years, a new novel from Kesey--a brilliant, funny, heartening tale of the power of love to stomp out evil in the last decent town on earth--proves that the heroic old Trickster can still pitch a fastball. Just after the turn of the millennium, Isaak Sallas, a.k.a ``the Bakatcha Bandit,'' a legendary environmental warrior from the ``Nasty Nineties,'' wakes up in his antique trailer to confront a couple of unwelcome omens from the end of the world. The most deadly sign is the silvery albino Nick Levertov, the bad-seed son of Alice (``the Angry Aleut''), battering the hell out of blowzy Louise Loop. The next day, watching a huge silver movie-company yacht sail into the harbor with Levertov aboard, Sallas realizes that Levertov has come back to Kuinak, Alaska, to settle a score of grievances. A couple of decades before, Sallas, once a CIA flier who won the Navy Cross, had to bear the death of his baby daughter- -a death caused by his own exposure to pesticides. The tragedy transformed him absolutely. The next day, he used his pesticide plane to drop a fragrant load on an upper-middle-class crowd at a California county fair: right ``Bakatcha.'' His fire had burned out long since, he now thinks. He'd hoped to live in peaceful obscurity in this last unpolluted backwater, fishing with the jolly Brit skipper Carmody and his Rasta sidekick Greer. Now, however, with Levertov buying up and corrupting the town with wads of movie money and piles of a designer drug called ``Scoot,'' Sallas discovers that he has the stuff--the love and faith--to drive evil out of town: ``Dolls were being set up, and being knocked down. The situation was in progress, and in dedicated lock; it couldn't be blinked and it couldn't be ducked.'' A wonderful tale for the times, proving Kesey is ``Bakacha'' after all these years. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Deuce steps in... just like real life
Ken Kesey's recent passing made me look back at my favorite books of his and fellow trafficker in the anti-Divine Jack Kerouac and somehow I revisited SAILOR SONG first. The New York TIMES didn't like it when it was published in '93 but I recall thinking "They're just not on the bus... DUHHHH" and bought it anyway. The ride was stellar, and it still is. Kesey's tale of the last bunch of individualist crazies at the end of America (and the world too) has its flaws, and I agree with the other online reviews you will read here: the end has a deus ex machina look to it (not that one character, the bookish Billy the Squid, doesn't red-flag the reader with a warning mid-on; a spectacularly nervy aside), the romance subplot is a bit shaky, the air of the novel smacks of the NORTHERN EXPOSURE television show from a few years back, the end of Bad Guy Nick Levertov is not as well-described as it might be... but the central theme of a moneyed juggernaut sailing into an untamed, delightfully-chaotic-because-it's-meant-to-be backwater of America (whatever, as Jack K. said in his dedication in VISIONS OF CODY, that is) strikes a chord on my piano. In SAILOR SONG two halves of America (Babbitt versus Walt Whitman) collide, and thanks to the success of the Babbitt half over many years (the befouling of the natural world) the payback interrupts the flow of the novel. Another nervy trick from the old Prankster, but for me it works. Because as we can see from the disrupted weather patterns of the last 20 years, we are going to be in a similar situation very shortly. And Kesey's description of Mother Nature's payback to the human race is the best thing in the book. Well, not quite, but close. Ike Sallas is the tired hero, letting things swirl around him, stepping in at exactly the wrong moment to little effect, and his very ineffectuality is what makes him as real as he is here (most especially when he finds he has fans who take up his cudgel for him in the immediate vicinity). And the asides, some of them borrowed from Walt Kelly ("From here on down it's uphill all the way"), the Grateful Dead, Tom Pynchon, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack
Kerouac himself, all widen the scope into an 'American saga'
(yes, one of those) which may not be ON THE ROAD, but it isn't about finding oneslf by leaving. It's about finding oneself by living. A divine read. Thanks, Ken.

Sailor Song: Where Art & Life Meet in the End
Up front: I'm a long-time fan of Ken's -- including the videos, the CDs, and his classic periodical SPIT IN THE OCEAN. I liked SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION a lot better as a book than a film. So that's where I'm coming from...

SAILOR SONG is superb, remarkable and unmatched in contemporary literature. Ken's grasp of the human condition is extraordinary: man/woman, inter-family, small town, international, global, you name it and Ken's got it in SAILOR SONG. It's an easier read than NOTION, but not as clearcut as NEST.

So many posts here question the ending; not me. I trust Ken ended this the way he saw fit, like the master he was. Life doesn't end cleanly, even though it begins with promise and evolves with careful plot. I don't think any other writer has addressed the scenario of the poles shifting, so while this isn't quite an "end of the world" tale, surely it's clear why Ken dubbed this his science fiction novel.

The characters are unforgettable, and yes the novel reads like a screenplay because it is so extraordinarily vividly written. There are plot twists and curlicues galore -- that's the skill and scope of Kesey coming across. SAILOR SONG, like his other novels, is brimming with quotable phrases and passages that ache for outboarding and inclusion in BARTLETT'S BOOK OF QUOTATIONS. He's that good.

The scenario overall is unforgettable, and the pace is so beguiling that despite the novel's length; when it was over my ONLY regret was that there wasn't more superb literature to keep me riveted. If you are anxious to be engaged, challenged and rewarded by a book time and again, savor SAILOR SONG to the last drop. There ain't no dregs here, just sweet wonderful language coming from a mind without equal. Ken's passing last November was a loss without measure, but we readers are blessed with these words. Enjoy!

A song to awaken the Prankster in us all ! ! !
This is Keysey's most brilliant comentary on the present state of affair of the global village as seen from the not to distant future.