Review: Clovis, by Michael Fessier

Clovis, by Michael Fessier

a review by Rich Horton

A couple of months ago I read an issue of F&SF with a story by Michael Fessier, an author with whom I was completely unfamiliar. I read up on him, and learned that he had written a couple genre or genre-adjacent novels, and, especially after I enjoyed his story in that issue, I decided I'd track down the novels. And here then is Clovis, a very short novel (about 33,000 words), published in 1948. (It was reprinted as recently as 2000.)

Fessier (1905-1988) published several SF or Fantasy stories (three of them reprinted in F&SF and another anthologized by Murray Leinster) and a couple of fantastical novels. He's better known as a screenwriter, with credits including the Fred Astaire/Rita Hayworth musical You'll Never Get Rich and even an episode of Gilligan's Island. In the '30s and '40s he worked in Hollywood, writing a couple of dozen produced screenplays, then he moved to New York and wrote for television, with his final contributions being six episodes for The High Chaparral, ending in 1969. From 1961 until his death in 1988 he was married to the actress Lilian Bond, but he must have been married at least once before because the jacket copy on this novel states that as of its publication in 1949 he is married with two children. (The 1940 census shows that his wife was named Suta, and he had two children, Josephine (3 years old) and Michael (10 months old).) He also wrote a good deal of short fiction -- not just the SF but a fair amount of crime fiction and some fiction for the slicks. He wrote at least one other novels: Fully Dressed and in his Right Mind, a noirish novel with fantastical elements, from 1935. His papers are at the University of Oregon, and their catalog claims manuscripts for three novels -- I can't find the third unless it is Nessuno l'avrebbe detto, published in Italy in 1949 (but in translation). That means "Nobody Would Ever Say", and I'm inclined to believe it's a translation of Clovis.

Clovis is an intelligent parrot, the result of hundreds of years of breeding by the von Lerner family. The last of the von Lerners is August, and Clovis is the last of his line of parrots. They live in Brazil. Clovis is remarkably intelligent (much more so than August) and he is cynical, and he is tired of his life. He decides to leave August, and find some parrots, and give them the benefit of his greater knowledge. He also might get some female action. But of course, as he learns to his displeasure, life in the jungle is harder than he had realized, and the parrots don't have any interest in his intellectual discourse.

He is captured by some local Indians, who are ready to roast him when an American named Thad rescues him -- only to cage him and put him on a boat to New York, figuring a talking parrot will fetch him a tidy sum. But Clovis escapes, and ends up in a pet shop. He manipulates his potential buyers until he ends up with a nice-seeming old lady, but of course that doesn't go well either. And his adventures continue -- he uncovers a plot to murder a young heiress, cures her cousin of alcoholism, and ends up back in the hands of Thad, who has fallen for the heiress, and she for him except she is convinced she has no sex drive and frustrated when Thad won't confirm the diagnosis by giving in to her attempts at seduction. Thad's moneymaking schemes come to nothing until he runs into a crooked evangelist -- and suddenly Clovis' cynicism and ability to talk have an outlet. But ...

Well, I won't say more. The book is out and out satire, though mostly somewhat gentle (except in the treatment of the evangelist.) And it is often very funny. The romance plot with Thad and the heiress, and the drinking cure, are almost Wodehousian. Clovis' cynical utterances are quite amusing as well. The murder plot is very light-hearted, and doesn't come off quite as amusing as the rest of the book. The book doesn't outstay its welcome -- though it probably reaches the limits of its welcome! Fun stuff on the whole, and I have to say I'm glad I read it.