Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #333878 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Synopsis
William Burroughs shot his wife. But he was very kind to cats...This adventure story set in the jungle of Madagascar starts with a pirate on Madagascar who develops an obsessive relationship with a lemur and attempts to set up a Utoplan society. It then spins out to take in famllar Burroughs obsessions: drugs, paranoia, the origins of disease and the devastation of the universe - the obsessions that mark the work of the man who Norman Mailer once called, "the only American writer possessed by genlus." Driven by his concern about global environmental catastrophe. Burroughs concocts a powerful moral brew in one of his most accessible and finest books.

Customer Reviews

Lemurs and diseased minds
A short novella, Ghost of Chance is on the surface the story of Captain Mission, a supposedly historical figure turned pirate, with a unique vision for a utopian society on the island of Madagascar. His colony, dubbed `Libertatia', has no capital punishment, no slavery, and no influence on religion or sexuality. The one, rather strange, commandment is that all inhabitants respect the native lemurs. From this unusual but relatively straightforward starting point, Burroughs quickly abandons his linear narrative to indulge in the addressing of some familiar concerns, namely paranoia, drug use and the irrevocable human stain. Embodied by "The Board", a mysterious and sinister group propagating the "Big Lie", the human race, with its Cartesian belief in the lack of an animal soul, threatens the safety of the settlement and the population of the ghost lemurs, to whom Mission has pledged protection.
Touching a variety of philosophical bases and delivering a broadside on the viral nature of Christianity, yet with some oddly over-wrought footnotes, Burroughs' lectures are all the more apt for their prescience in a time of global ecological uncertainty, and his own chaotic illustrations add an extra dimension of impending doom.
Challenging, yet evocative, Burroughs haunts the imagination.

Ghost of Chance
"Ghost of Chance" has a lot in common with "Cities of the Red Night" - probably Burroughs' best work - in that it further explores what might have been possible if the imperial/capitalist interests did not win out a couple of hundred years ago. As always, Burroughs is concerned with human potential and individual freedom. Here, though, he is explicitly concerned with political organisation and its consequences for us and for the rest of existence. Captain Mission and Libertatia (the reality of which maritime historians argue about- accounts are conflicting) are symbols of hope - though ones that never had much of a chance. The title is a pun and this is one of its meanings. The Madagascan colony is a "ghost" - a missed opportunity (for humans to live in a free but still organised manner) that didn't survive for the most trivial reasons (it didn't have time to get properly established and fortified before it was attacked). Things could have turned out very differently... The second meaning of the title refers to lemurs; "Lemur" is derived from the Latin "lemures" which means "ghosts". Human destruction/stupidity/greed is making ghosts out of every other species on the planet... bloodlust, the capitalist system and basic rottenness are ruining the earth. Burroughs lectures a bit in this novella but he has to; desperate times call for desperate measures. Read this book, wake up and get angry. Wise up the marks. Things have to change!

Definitely worth the read; whatever you want to make of it!
Ghost of Chance is the second book by Burroughs that I've read: the first was Naked Lunch, a book which rollercoastered my opinion while reading it -- at first it was amazing, then waffle, then genius etc... By the time I had finished though, I knew that it was going to be a book that would stay in my psyche for ages. The same is true of this book, Ghost Of Chance, and reading this I felt glad I was already aquainted with the Burroughs style.
It seems like a straight forward read (I knocked it off in a couple of hours) but the experience stays with you and haunts you: the language, the visions, the philosophy. Even the opening surface of the adventure story puzzles: is the afterword actual fact that fills in the holes, or yet another of Burroughs' fictions. Fascinating.
As well as the imponderables, there is also much to access straight-away: what he has to say about the environment and religious and political usury is excellent.
It all combines into what one reviewer calls a "moral brew." It's certainly a heady, strange brew if you want it to be, but because of the book's size it can also be a couple an afternoons indulgence and no more if that is what you want to.