Page 45 Review by Stephen
Welcome to Lizzneyland! It’s just like Disneyland but with longer queues, fewer lawyers and entry is a lot less expensive!
You can even stay overnight by reading this in bed before falling asleep and letting the wonders float through your dreams. You may wish to bring a picnic hamper, however, for the Fast Foodz on offer are far from healthy: 15 quid for an all-day, all-you-can-drink Cup o’ Cola (“refill, refuel, regurgitate”), chipz that contain no potato and hot dogz that contain no real meat – not even dog. Beware of false advertising!
The best ride is the Emotional Rollercoaster, though that may be the 10-hour queue.
Like all Lizz Lunney comics which appear on the surface to be 100% bananas (unlike the bananaz), this is all so fiercely observed: cats queuing silently just like humans, occasionally exchanging glances but never words then quickly looking away; being trapped next to a litterbin filled with food and whizzing with wasps when you’ve already invested so much time you simply cannot run away; and indeed the false summit which is that snaking queue. You think there’s just 15 minutes to go but peer past the corner and it turns out to be 15 hours!
Parenthetically, don’t you find it’s the same when you close Microsoft Outlook and the back-up proceeds to read, “3 minutes… 2 minutes… 18 minutes… 3 hours… 355 days…”?
I absolutely adore the infectious enthusiasm of those brave souls who finally board the barf-inducing rides enticingly named ‘Black Hole’, ‘Oblivion’ and ‘You Will Never See Your Parents Again’ and wave their hands in the air like they don’t care when I can only grip onto my harness for dear life. It’s subtle, but Lunney nails the abrupt turn of a speeding rollercoaster and its effect on the waving, almost wailing arms of its occupants. Well, apart from guest-star DEPRESSED CAT who has his figurative arms folded for maximum malaise. And ennui. And, oh… *sigh*.
This is Lizz Lunney’s best book to date. For all her effervescence there is always a serious streak observing the human condition which rears its head here in a two-page interlude beginning with a stylised but immediately recognisable self-portrait fraught with Schultz-like underfrowns:
“As soon as you know about the possibility of something you worry about it.”
Immediately she deflects that undeniable truth with a pseudo-scientific dissection of Leaning Rabbit’s brain. Leaning Rabbit doesn’t engage most of his brain for anything other than leaning, and so has no worries. There are three tiny exceptions devoted to carrots, toilet and sex. But even so there is “no room in his brain for worry”.
“So from that, “Doctor Lunney deduces, “we can conclude that the secret to avoiding worry is to think about something else…”
Her beatifically beaming face exudes spangly stars of equanimous optimism, and she looks as sublime as her supine specimen. But the underlying message so cleverly conveyed through the experiment’s self-evidently glib procedure is this: it’s easier said than done.
