HANNIBAL'S LAST HURRAH

By John Skow

Why the globe should need another umbrous island, anchored by one man's imagination halfway between Iceland and Greenland, is not something novelist (and former TIME contributor) Brad Leithauser bothers to explain. If you don't like Freeland, the gray and chilly outpost of which he is the sole curator of history, customs and current events, then chase your moonbeams in Lake Wobegon or your copperheads in Yoknapatawpha County.

The advice here, however, is to stick with The Friends of Freeland (Knopf; 508 pages; $26), an amiable and decidedly quirky novel. Its narrator, Eggert Oddason, is chief speechwriter and grand vizier to Freeland's President, a gifted though alcoholic giant named Hannibal Hannibalsson. After 20 years of ever decreasing coherence, Hannibalsson breaks a solemn promise to retire and runs for, or lurches blearily toward, a fifth five-year term. Can he win? His opponent is a woodenhead, and being booze-soaked is no bar to high office, since that is pretty much the permanent condition of most of the population. But Hannibalsson's administration has embittered Freeland's young people by severely limiting the amount of rock 'n' roll played on the national radio station. Opposition coalesces around this offense against social justice. A team of slick political consultants arrives from the U.S. to connive against the incumbent.

As the reader ventures through territory like this, the question arises, "Yes, it's clever, but what's the point?" With Leithauser's novel, that question is precisely not the point. The author, who has spent time in Iceland and the Faroes, invented Freeland not to write a political parable but because the more he thought of this imagined place, the more it fascinated him. Its texture is rich and believable. Early in his career the President bankrupted the small nation to build an old folks' home at the base of a big mountain. Now, "mountain-viewing" is local slang for dying. That sounds real. And so does the quotation Leithauser slyly invents for Herman Melville, "on his sole North Atlantic whaling voyage" in 1850: Freeland, the great writer deplored, was "a humble acme in the planet's perennial pursuit of utter desolation."

--By John Skow