Swallowing a Donkey's Eye

by Paul Tremblay

Join Farm today! It's only six years of your life! Farm is the mega-conglomerate food supplier for City, populated with rabidly bureaucratic superiors, antagonistic and sexually deviant tour guides dressed in chicken and duck suits, and farm animals illegally engineered for silence. City is sprawling, technocratic, and rests hundreds of feet above the coastline on the creaking shoulders of a giant wooden pier. When the narrator's single mother, whom he left behind in City, falls out of contact, he fears the his mother is homeless and subsequently to be deported under City to the Pier. On his desperate search to find his mother, he encounters ecoterrorists wearing plush animal suits, an election that hangs in the balance as the City's all-powerful Mayor is infatuated with magic refrigerators and outlaw campaigns, and a wise-cracking, over-sexed priest who may or may not have ESP, but who is most certainly his deadbeat dad. Whether rebelling against the regimented and ridiculous nature of Farm life, exploring the all-too-familiar and consumer-obsessed world of City, experiencing the all-too-real suffering of the homeless in Pier, or confronting the secrets of his own childhood, Swallowing a Donkey's Eye's narrator is a hilarious, neurotic, and rage-filled Quixote searching for his mother, his own dignity, and the meaning of humanity.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Dystopia, Speculative Fiction, Horror Thriller, Satire

275 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, the Sheridan Le Fanu, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of the New York Times bestselling Horror Movie, The Beast You, Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted as the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family. He is represented by Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh, what, is that me and paul tremblay?? it most certainly is!

Trudi: haha! saw that title and my first thought was "oh noes, she has officially reached rock bottom with the monster porn!" You have corrupted me. I have been corrupted.

i loved this post so much, i had to use it to start my review. i hope that is okay.

i love that you people thought this was erotica. and i think paul will love it, too.

it is not erotic, though, despite a golden-shower scene. it is hard to say what it is. this book is two stories stuck together, in a chimera that somehow works.

because at first, i wasn't sure what i was going to think of it. we find ourselves in a future-dystopia, where our hero is living out a sort of contracted indentured servitude on "farm," a tourist-trap theme park where guides wear plush animal costumes and lead tour groups through faux-bucolic settings to gawp at people who have given up their freedom in exchange for a little money to send home, while they toil to produce food for "city", and live animals have had their vocal cords removed, so that animal sounds must be pumped in to delight its visitors. "city" rests on top of a pier, under which all the homeless have been relocated and left for dead, and is a horrorshow of consumerism gone mad, whose inhabitants are aggressively accosted by people wearing television screens showing commercials, and live in fear of being sent under the pier.

this kind of satire of bureaucracy and commercialism usually bores my teats off. i get it, i get the dehumanization and the moral deadening, i get the complacency and the lassitude of people under the strongarm of capitalist greed and genetic meddling, but it rarely transcends its own delight in its own perceived allegorical cleverness to become anything more than just a sad empty shell of a story.

ah, but this one goes a step further. and it shuttles the reader back-and-forth between this lunatic setting and the memories of our hero's life before-farm, and the circumstances that led to his choosing farm in the first place. these parts of the novel are told in very clear-eyed prose, which contrasts nicely with the carnivalesque and absurd farm-and-city chapters.

by the end, when we find ourselves under the pier, the carnival all but drops away, and we are confronted with humanity at its most desperate, and there is such amazingly wonderful pathos, and i couldn't help but feel sympathy for a character who until that point had been under a pretty harsh spotlight.

paul promised:

I'll only say it starts off wacky, crazy, and hopefully funny, and gets darker/more serious as you go, until you're a weeping puddle by the end. Or something that like. ;)

and while i have never been a weeping puddle in my life koff The Piper's Son koff Mother, Come Home , i will say that it does do a good job of providing an emotional counterpoint to what would otherwise have been just a cerebral endeavor.

and while i still hold In the Mean Time closer to my blackened heart, this book reaffirms my love for paul tremblay and for czp, the only publisher i have ever maintained a crush on.

come to my blog!

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read 10/13/16 - 10/16/16
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended: it'll blow you off your ass like a donkey bomb, yo!
Pages: 276
Publisher: ChiZine Publications
Released: 2012





This book knocked my fucking socks off. I found the subversive and satirical nature of the novel intriguing as all hell and chewed through the thing like ET on a trail of Reese's pieces.

In it, we find ourselves in the hands of an unnamed narrator who's signed himself over to Farm for six years in an effort to help relieve his mom of some of her financial burdens. Farm, as its name would imply, supplies City with food and relies on people like our narrator to break their backs for slave-wages. There are apples to pick, animals to tend to, and strange guided tours where City residents are escorted by people dressed in Chicken and Duck costumes on trams, where they can watch Farm's indentured servants hard at work. Our narrator, like all Farm members, smiles and waves (smile and wave boys, smile and wave) all the while counting down the years he has left before he can finally walk away from it all. That is, until one deranged Duck passes along the message that his mom is in danger of losing her home. After our guy checks in with his barn manager, he discovers his checks haven't been cashed and his mother's account has been terminated and begins to plot his escape to find her. Of course, he doesn't have to wait long, because Duck and her fellow furries revolt against Farm and our narrator makes a break for City under the cover of all the chaos.

City is, well, the city, and like any city, is crowded and crappy and full of assholes. City is where our narrator grew up. Through some incredibly well placed chapters, we learn all about our narrator's fucked up relationship with his mother, whose name is Mary, and about how they were abandoned by his father Joseph (because Joseph wanted to focus on becoming a priest and hello, loving the names and the religious themes that are buried within this story right now you guys). And now, too, it's starting to make sense, why our narrator would leave the relative (I use this word loosely) comfort of City for the controlling and demanding servitude of Farm. And wouldn't you know it, as our narrator enters City and breaks into his mother's home, which true to Duck's word appears to be empty, he stumbles into his father the Father, who has a proposal for him. His father the Father needs him to run for Mayor, and in doing so, father the Father promises that City will not prosecute (AKA terminate) him for running away from Farm. Welp. Looks like our main guy has little choice in the matter, then. So run for Mayor he does. And because he is a wanted man, during his campaign father the Father forces our dude into hiding under City.

You should know that City is built on Pier, which is like any ole pier, made of wood and suspended over the ocean, except this particular Pier is where City dumps its waste, both garbage and human - it's where the homeless and sickly citizens are sent to keep City clean. Father the Father has been working under Pier for years, caring for the terminally ill in a section called Home, where the dying are comforted and then cremated and released into the ocean. Our narrator is put to work in Home against his wishes, and spends time wandering Pier, looking for sick people to bring back Home with them. During these searches, he continues asking about his mother and will not stop until he discovers where they - City, Pier, or Farm - have sent her.

Farm were my favorite, and far and away the strongest, chapters of the book. In them, Paul Tremblay did a fantastic job setting the stage for this dystopian, futuristic world and imbued his characters with such fascinating and sometimes downright ridiculous senses of humor. He perfectly balanced the bleak 1984 feel of the novel with things like a monthly mating dance for the Farm residents (I kid you not, they even issued them condoms!). And the deeper into the book we go, through City and ultimately Pier, the further we are buried beneath the horrorshow that is our narrator's mayoral campaign. Yet through all of the bureaucracy and the dehumanization, Tremblay continuously pulls us out from under it all and gives us a poke in the ribs - an exploding donkey's ass, a golden-shower (I swear!), and some good-humored banter between father and son - to lighten the mood and give us a bit of a breather.

A great addition to the always growing sub-genre of dystopian, big-brother fiction.

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

Paul Tremblay’s Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye (ChiZine Publications) is a contemporary version of Animal Farm amped up on bitterness, future technology and sad realizations that things are not going to end well. Our unnamed narrator is forced into situations beyond his control, a reluctant hero in search of his mother, an angry youth who has little love left for his father, a boy not quite ready to be a man.

As a teen, he runs off to work at Farm, thinking he is helping his mother. Years later when his paychecks bounce back to him, her account closed, he fears the worst. An opportunity to escape presents itself, and he flees Farm, only to run into his father, who has set him up to be the next mayor of City—or perhaps just a patsy waiting for the fall.

Farm is corporate, Farm is omniscient, Farm is both alpha and omega. Trapped in meaningless jobs, a contract signed for slave wages with no way out, the environment is false, layered, and humiliating:

“If we don’t smile, if we don’t follow the tour Protocol to the capital P, if we break any rules, if we’re late for any shifts, if we swear at supervisors, if we swear at the animals, if we’re caught having sex on the job with co-worker or animal, if we’re caught stealing or eating or sabotaging the animals, we’re contractually and severely punished.”

So it goes. Tremblay paints a dystopian portrait in the gaps between the ritual and the work, the mundane and the weird. Picture this for a moment, the setting for Home—a world buried far underneath the ground, where the destitute go to die:

“Spread out before me is a living Escher painting. Denuded sequoia trees serve as the giant support posts for City and they are as big as anything I’ve ever seen, or even imagined, thicker than skyscrapers, their height disappearing into a cloudy darkness above. Struts and beams, both horizontal and angled span across the distances between the posts, some are wide enough for four lanes of two-way pedestrian traffic while others are as skinny as a flagpole. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern or reason to the construction of any of it. I see a spider web and then I blink and I see spokes in a bike tire, I blink again and I see the gnarled inner branches of a rose bush. All this I see in every direction, until darkness. And all over everything is humanity and their adaptations and appendages.”

But in addition to the futuristic setting, a society that is beyond comprehension, with its Farm and its Dump—Tremblay manages to take a step back from a story that is one depressing moment after another. He injects humor into the lives of his characters on a regular basis, which is a great relief to the reader, showing how these people deal with this strange new world. In speaking about his father, the Father, our narrator says:

“He’s starting to grow on me. Like a melanoma.”

The banter between our hero and his father, the Father, is riddled with good humor and insults, curse words and idle threats. It allows us to relax for a moment, to joke with them about their difficult situations, to ignore for a moment the harsh realities of the world they inhabit.

Tremblay could have stopped here, leaving us with a story that was unusual and humorous, not deep or emotional—but he doesn’t. By working in back story, by showing us the quiet moments between a mother and her son, he forces us to put down our guard, to imagine for a moment what must have come before the boy left home, before the mother disappeared, before things got messy and chaotic. Take this early scene where our narrator talks of the imaginary spider in the elevator, a thinly veiled disguise of what he wishes his mother would do:

“…she would wrap me up tighter, into a warm cocoon, rub my belly and back, cozy up real close to me, so close I wouldn’t know what was cocoon and what was her, and whisper sweet lies about how everything would be okay and I’d listen and want to believe her.”

What allows this story to breathe, to seep into our pores, is the balance that Tremblay creates between fantasy and reality, between moments we have never witnessed, and dark horrors and quiet lives that we’ve all endured in excruciating detail. We have all come from homes, from families, we have formed our parental bonds, or allowed them to be severed. We have labored at humiliating jobs for terrible pay and sworn to the darkness that we would not let this stand. We have prayed for salvation, and cursed our weaknesses as we cried ourselves to sleep in hopes of something changing tomorrow—always tomorrow. The truth is camouflaged as humor. When reading Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, be careful when you let your guard down—know that Tremblay is shaking his left fist, swinging that arm around, forcing your attention over here, so you don’t see what he’s doing over there, and then BAM, the uppercut, sending you sprawling to the canvas. These parting words say it all:

“What [is] more confusing or depressing than watching your gods become human?

[Nicholas Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tremblay's dystopian, near-future sf novel is funny, angry, and bittersweet all at once. The setting, City, is a place of rampant bureaucracy and injustice, but Tremblay, like his windblown narrator, digs deep enough to find both the absurdity and the heart buried inside it. Tremblay has always been a writer with a deep sense of humanity that comes through in his work, and the deeper you get into SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE, the more humanity you'll find amid its sometimes slapdash shenanigans, over the top secondary characters, and fascinating details that are left frustratingly unexplored (e.g., what's up with that magic refrigerator?). The novel takes place in the same world as Tremblay's 2007 themed collection, CITY PIER, and though knowledge of those stories adds a nice extra layer to one's enjoyment of DONKEY, it's not integral to the experience. But after reading DONKEY, I would definitely recommend getting a hold of CITY PIER, if you haven't read it already. City is a place worth exploring.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this needs to be a quick review, as the longer it takes for you to read this, the further away you are from reading this novel. This was an absolute pleasure to read. I have never really thought of myself as a futuristic/dystopian fan, but this opened my eyes to a whole new world. One that perhaps I didn't really want to take a peek at. It was dark, perverse and yet pulled me in like a black hole. I will avoid a long summary, but just know that the main character is a tragic hero who takes us on a humorous yet thought-provoking ride through love, hate, life and death. While reading this, I had flashbacks to high school when I read George Orwell's 1984 in Grade 10. It took me back to Big Brother and a futuristic world of control. Overall, a strange and bizarre read, but absolutely fascinating at the same time. 5 Golden Showers..... I mean Stars.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an odd and awesome book this is. What starts out as a kind of madcap dystopia turns much deeper and weirder as it goes on. Some of it is hilarious, some of it is profoundly disturbing, but it kept surprising me and defying my expectations, which is excellent, and under the duck suits and golden showers....well, let's say beyond the duck suits and golden showers, there's a novel with serious ambitions and some very challenging ideas about life and death and love and forgiveness.

[Moshe · Rating 5 out of 5]

With post-modern echoes of "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," (also a young man's journey to find word of a missing/departed parent) this novel leads the reader deep into the underbelly of a perfected Capitalist dystopia. The slapstick, stylized, and colorful (in the way that an abandoned, haunted amusement park is colorful) tone is a change of pace for Tremblay—while maintaining the author's tongue-in-cheek (or in this case, tongue-in-beak) irreverence that makes the pointedly harsh lessons about our own American society slightly (though not totally) easier to stomach. For every golden-shower-happy, duck-suited lunatic, there is an equal measure of authentic human feeling, a reflection of our (or at least, my) frustration with a culture depending less and less on empathy and more on ease, comfort, and 'protection'—at the small, negligible cost of our humanity. Tremblay offers the range of human experience, from the gross to the sincere, in a way that only an author sure of his vision and willing to take a risk or two (did I mention the golden-shower-happy, duck-suited lunatic?) can achieve. Five stars and a shiny, genetically-unrecognizable apple.

[Daniel G Keohane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a refreshing, absurd and very enjoyable novel. The main character and first-person narrator (who isn’t given a name) is a twenty-something who has left home in City to begin work on Farm. These locales are named for what they are, Farm, City and later in the story, Pier, a poverty- and disease-stricken place below City where the homeless and poor are exiled. When the main character learns that his mother (and this young man has some major mother and father issues, a trait which drives him throughout the story) has been kicked out of her home he becomes caught in the middle of a power struggle between a group of revolutionaries, a corrupt Mayor and an even more corrupt political system which seems always on the brink of collapse. Another review compared this short novel to the cult film BRAZIL, and I have to agree. Might be why I enjoyed it so much. That, and the fact that a lot of characters with whom the narrator has to contend are dressed in chicken suits. Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye is one of those books that live outside your normal cookie-cutter read. It delivers a wonderful story in the midst of such a surreal landscape. If you like to be surprised when reading, and pleasantly so, check this one out.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

You could call Tremblay’s novel the Ani­mal Farm or Nine­teen Eighty-Four for a new gen­er­a­tion, but that would be easy, and not quite right. Like our other two entries, there’s a great deal of sur­face enjoy­ment here, just enjoy­ing the ride, but Trem­blay con­tin­u­ally digs to find hid­den deposits of emo­tion beneath the crazy, usu­ally in ref­er­ence to the name­less narrator’s child­hood. There’s a lot of Orwell scat­tered about, yes, but Aldous Hux­ley and Dou­glas Adams are def­i­nitely present in spirit, result­ing in a delight­fully neu­rotic search for self and human­ity in a uni­verse that couldn’t give a rat’s ass whether you live or die.

Read the full review here.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not that George Orwell needed a makeover, really. He's probably more pertinent today than he ever was. What Paul Tremblay did with SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE is to twist ANIMAL FARM into a strange, trapezoidal object of wonder. Unlike Orwell's fable, this is an all-out dystopia that talks to people of our age. Maybe it won't age as well as the classic, but it speaks louder to our generation.

Tremblay goes over the most troubling issues of our age from corporate work environment, to our relationship to reality television and religion. It's a satirical novel at its core, but like good satire, it doesn't lose itself in humor and it hurts as much as it makes you smile. Another ballsy release by ChiZine.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Tremblay's SWALLOWING A DONKEY'S EYE is an odd story. It's funny, artisric, real and dark. The protagonist id on a journey. Sometimes your sitting right next to him and other times your in another car along side observing.

The generic settings of Farm and City serve both as chatacters if tbe story but also insignificant stories. The story itself feels detatched at times yet the plight of the protagonist pulks you through the plot undaunted.

This is an interesting story that takes place in an interesting world. It's a story about family, disfunctional and yet close. Give it a read it's well worth it. Thanks to BookedPodcast.com for recommending this gem.

[Martha Hood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Swallowing A Donkey's Eye tells a farcical, satirical, funny, angry, heartfelt, and tragic story. It takes place in an imaginary City, in the now/otherwhen. Roughly the first third is farcical, the second, satirical, and the third is heartfelt. All of it is funny, angry, and tragic. I liked it a lot.

I had a teensy-weensy bit of trouble with a big reveal/plot turn near the end. It didn't quite fit, somehow. Balancing that, the heartfelt part near the end involving the handwritten letter, followed by what our protagonist wished he'd written....well, that was just brilliant.

This is the first Paul Temblay book I've read. I will certainly pick up another at some time in the future.

[Karen Heuler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a terrific read and it just kept getting better. It’s funny, sad, smart, and continually surprising. A young man in a dystopic world of theme parks and arbitrary decisions breaks out of the Farm and finds that he’s in an orchestrated run for Mayor. He’s also on a quest to find his mother, who’s disappeared—apparently to the Pier, the underworld beneath City, where all the refuse and homeless are tossed. It’s a magnificent world, screwy and awful and touching. Tremblay’s vision is sardonic and humane and the plot makes a shrewd and darkly funny run to its very satisfying end.

[Michael Louis Dixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Tremblay's Swallowing a Donkey's Eye was a very fun read. It's a unique story that is somewhat absurdist. It feels like a mix between Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, and George Orwell, but it definitely has its own voice. I enjoyed every minute I spent reading this book.

I highly recommend this book.

[eliiizabethrae · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is satirical and comical and chaotic and i CANNOT WAIT until i forget everything so i can reread it

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable, different to his other books black comedy had a nice twist at end.

[Rob McMonigal · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young man from a broken family tries to make the best of it in a dystopian city by working at "Farm," an artificial place that provides genetically altered food. When he learns his mother may be in trouble, he needs to escape, but leaving Farm isn't so easy. Soon he's on the run, entering politics, and learning that life is a miserable, complex thing, no matter what you do.

This book has some rough edges, but its overall theme--the chaos of life--appeals to the side of me that fell in love with Joseph Conrad back in college. I like it when authors show that no matter how hard we try to plan or prepare for life, there's no way to be prepared for everything.

The story itself is a fractured hero's journey, as the narrator realizes his life is shit and that there's very little he can do to change that. Moments when he's literally interacting with garbage really drive that point home. He's extremely bitter, and that tone might turn some readers off, but it worked for me.

What worked less was some of the moving back and forth in terms of his reflections. With the pace of his journey, I felt like those slowed things down a bit too much. Overall, however, this was definitely worth reading for those who like dark fiction and can handle a few bumps along the way. Reading in context of Trump's America, the ideas of how City treats its marginalized people is chilling--because it looks very much like what we're headed for soon.

[Elsiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young man manages to escape Farm when his mother goes missing in City, scared that she has gone homeless and been sent to Pier.
Upon arrival, he stumbles upon his father, who left the house when he was a teenager, who tells him, City wants him...as a mayor.

In a very dark and dystopian world, we come to follow the journey of that kinda rude character, entangled between gouvernment pressures, political issues and his personal beliefs.

I really liked how the characters were developping, in that very strange world, especially the main character whose journey we follow. I also liked the change in tone between the first part, where things seem kinda crazy and you can take things rather lightly and the second part, that becomes very serious, and deep.

Overall very good book, I really liked it and really got caught up in it. Definetively recommand for those who like themselves a good dystopian tale.

[Isidore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had mixed experiences with Tremblay in the past (disliking the narcoleptic detective books, liking much of the short fiction), so it's nice to be able to recommend this book without reservation. Although the invention of comic dystopias seems a growth industry these days, this novel is completely fresh and often delightful. The first third, which deals with life on the Farm, is perhaps the liveliest and most memorable part of the book, but the rest, recounting the hapless protagonist's adventures in the City and the Pier, is also very satisfying, even if hilarity is increasingly displaced by introspection and much darker satire of grim social realities; the end is unexpectedly moving. Tremblay's deft, witty prose, which borrows its understated irony from the hardboiled detective tradition, is fun to read throughout. Recommended to all except fans of agribusiness and harsh treatment of the homeless.

[Ashley Peacock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Took me forever to read because I couldn't ever engage in the story. I hated all of the characters. The author's humor never resonated with me. The satire felt so over the top, I felt there was no message. In fact there's no growth or purpose to the story. Not something I enjoyed reading.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another charming, funny, sad, strange tale from a very talented writer.

[Booked podcast · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hear our complete review here: http://www.bookedpodcast.com/2012/08/...

[Karl]

This is copy 31 of 150 signed numbered copies.

[Jake Kasten · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining satire of capitalist culture that feels a bit like it's aping George Saunders without quite reaching the highs that many of Saunders' similar stories reach - it's both not quite as fun to read as a Saunders story, nor does it ever feel quite as poignant. The sections about Farm are especially reminiscent of the eponymous stories from the collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia.

It's a book that feels like it couldn't quite decide what it wanted to critique, and because of that it feels a little shallow. There's a send-up of modern day politics as being nothing more than a reality show (an ominous and fairly accurate prediction). There's focus on the strained parent-child relationships, both the father who abandoned the family and the overly (even Oedipal?) mother-son bond. There's the hyper capitalist and ad-centered City. There's disregard for the homeless. There's unfair labor. There's just a little too much to pack into a 300 page book.

It's a quick, and still fairly engaging read, but not anything I think I'll return to or dwell on for long.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The idiots are shutting off this part of the fence. They’ll beep us when they’re ready.”

I notice angry-proletariat-guy Jonah is back. But I don’t say anything, I just nod, and stare at the fence. Wonder how far I can run before security nabs me; nabs being a more pleasant word than the phrase summarily executed. Let’s pretend I’m able to make it past the initial hurdle of the fence and Farm security, how would I make it through the checkpoints and into City?

Jonah says, “What a fucking mess, huh? We’ll have to wash the blood and shit off the fence, and look, his belly split. We’ll have to shovel all that fucking goo up, too. Goddamn donkey. My mother used to call a shit-job, ‘swallowing a donkey’s eye.’ Anything that you had to do but was the last thing you or anyone else wanted to be doing, she’d say, ‘I guess you just gotta swallow the donkey’s eye.’”

Then he winks. Jonah actually winks at me. I hear the first piece of any real information about the guy who I’ve shared more hours with than anyone this side of my mother, and then he gives me a smart-ass wink. I want to punch him, render him unconscious, then maybe hug him before I jump through the fence.

***

Paul Tremblay’s Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye is a madcap assortment of social stereotypes taken to their worst possible extremes, stitched together by a weird, oftentimes fetishistic, Wonderland-by-way-of-Oz family drama.

In the future world-in-a-bubble of Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, Farm, with its electrified white-picket perimeter fence, is a mega-conglomerate supplying the busy, bustling City with food and resources, while those unable to survive financially in City become homeless and are deported to Pier, where they are more or less sent to die. When our nameless narrator takes a bite from an apple not meant for him, thus breaking a commandment—er, rule of Farm, his life is quickly upended. Following a donkey-primed terrorist attack by the organization Farm Animal Revolution Today (yep, F.A.R.T.) he embarks on a strange journey to find his mother, filtered through overnight mayoral campaigns and Tweedle Dee/Tweedle Dum campaign managers, starring in his own reality television program, and hospice care with his over-sexed, abandoning, psychic priest of a father.

Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye is a joyfully ridiculous, almost Python-esque parody of a dystopia. The relationship between Farm and City is deliberately on the nose; from the animal sounds that are manufactured to provide more authenticity than if they were to come from the animals themselves, to the calculated fall ratio of apples from apple trees and the way Farm tours for City folk treat the Farm workers as part of the attraction, everything in Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye seems engineered to give the illusion of normalcy, of expectation, in a world gone to shit. This is further exemplified in the black-white dichotomy of most interactions—how everything seems transformed into a circus of the surreal via the most basic emotional and/or social resources.

The protection and financial security offered by employment—internment—with Farm carries with it obvious Eden symbolism. And of course, biting the apple, choosing to ignore the established rules and challenge the hierarchy, means exile by way of death. The world outside of Farm—City, Dump, Pier, Home—is segregated, split into inharmonious pockets without the safety and day-to-day-do-your-job-and-fly-right mentality of Farm life. The rural life provides, the urban life destroys, breaking individuals down into compost, to creatures of want with no ability to temper their desires or their emotions.

This rather blunt symbolism is made more palpable by Tremblay’s darkly comic writing and ADHD-style storytelling; this is a novel of tangents—of ideas introduced, and not necessarily forgotten, but quickly moved on from to further illustrate our very social compulsion for immediate gratification and constant change when things don’t exactly go our way. Tremblay’s world is a theatre of the absurd, distorted through a lens of what-may-be-but-let’s-sure-as-fuck-hope-to-avoid.

Tying it all together is the narrator’s quest for his mother. Through brief flashbacks of their life together in City, before the narrator signed up with Farm (as if he were joining the army), Tremblay offers shadows of a past the narrator both seeks to better understand and to continue to run from. The journey—from abandoning one’s beginnings and returning to them a changed man (and, somehow, a mayor)—is in many ways an exaggeration of the family dynamic, of distance erected by way of literal walls behind which the Wizard sits, and emotional ones—of an inability to do right by one’s creations, abandoning them to instead become a saviour to others.

Similar in many ways to his collection of short stories In The Mean Time, with Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye Tremblay seems less interested in the construction of a densely plotted narrative and more intrigued by finding new, strange, and unexpected ways to pick away at the dead skin of his characters, revealing layers upon layers of psychosis resting just beneath the surface. In his shorter narratives, I found this method to be jarring; in this novel, with its hyperactive self-awareness and by giving his narrator some room to breathe, the same approach is exciting and frequently hilarious.

Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye is not always original in the symbolism through which it explores its broader themes, but the manner in which Tremblay bounces from one idea to the next, never lingering too long or overstaying any one idea’s welcome, is consistently engaging, funny, and perhaps more important than anything else, it is never dull—not in the slightest.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book references Orwell, but the post-punk vibes of the novel feel more like Office Space or Idiocracy. Tremblay shouts out his rage in this fable about a dystopia that's so close to being how we live now. His characters are vivid and larger than life. They're capable of horrible things, but Tremblay graces them with a tenderness and a wit that makes them lovable. Read it instead of screaming.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

So strange but so good.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weird little book.

[Zivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a dystopic novel about a city gone mad and a guy that's caught in the cogs of the insane system.

The thing that I found difficult with Swallowing a Donkey's Eye by Paul Tremblay
Swallowing a Donkey's Eye, was the depressed tone of the narration. I'm not sure if it's the Audiobook or the tone of the text itself, but I preferred the more jovial tone of Love in the Time of Fridges. A similar book set in an city gone mad but with a more humerus tone.

Perhaps the humor helps me get over the dark dystopic cityscape.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Swallowing A Donkey's Eye is a brilliant dystopian satire along the same lines as the very best of Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders, but without mimicking the two masters distinctive voices. Tremblay charts his own path and with his vivid, hilarious prose brings the worlds of Farm, City,and Pier to horrifying life. Over the last several years with his weirdboiled novels, The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland, and his diverse, disturbing short story collection, In The Mean Time, Tremblay has become one of my favorite new writers, and in a perfect world, Swallowing A Donkey's Eye would deservedly be Tremblay's breakout novel.