Product Description

Kesey's first novel since "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion" in the early 1960s. Into the midst of a rich cast of characters in a run-down Alaskan fishing community, sails a ship of last hopes, loaded to the gunwales with a big-bucks Hollywood film company.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75216 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Customer Reviews

Cold water classic
This has to be one of my favourite books of all time. I think it's the second chapter in, the description and dialogue are so beautifully woven that you just have to put the book down in awe. Kesey is to my mind one of the best writers of dialogue and this book shows him at his finest. He was a writer who went for first hand research and lived the lives he wrote about. You can tell the parts of this book that he just made up and they lack the normal depth but the cold unreality they have instead adds to the coldness of the book set in an Inuit community chosen as the setting for an unlikely movie.

Sailor Song is One Fine Medley
As an author, Ken Kesey comes with a lot of 'baggage' - Psychedelic Prankster, Acid Frontiersman of the 60's, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (naturally). Anyone who read that book would remember the rich textures of the narrative and the anti-establishment ethos it celebrated. You will be pleased to know that age has not diminshed Kesey's attitude of cocking a snoot at the 'civilsing' forces of society, and the sneaking suspicions of all things technological. And indeed the Chief would have done himself a favour if the ride he hitched at the end of OFOTCN took him to Kuinak, the place of 'Sailor Song'. He would find like-minded company in the likes of Greer, Carmody, Alice and Ike. Each rebels in their own way, complex and contradictory, they eake out an existence far away from their pasts, amongst the oddballs and casualties of this end-of-the world community. Bickering, drinking, Scoot-snorting they may be, but Kesey displays strong affection for his characters, and so does the reader. The 'Us vs Them' attitude of OFOTCN is explored in the arrival of the 'Silver Fox' and the designs of one of its former sons, Nicholas Levertov. This albino antagonist shakes the dust from this ragbag collection of former activists, artists, intellectuals and philanderers. He is the Prodigal Son returning home to poison the fattened calf offered him. This Kuinak Community, and the events following the arrival of the chrome-plated Moby Dick of a yacht generates the engine of the plot, and Kesey takes you on a enjoyable ride. In turns comical, polemical and horrific, the story is a perfectley realised tale of the human spirit triumphing over all odds, natural and man made. He tells his tale as any good storyteller should, canny and colourful (Mark Twain would have been proud of the 'UnderDogs' and their riotus assembley). 'Sailor Song' is a novel informed with the spirit of its author, and no one cannot but be infected by it.

What a let down
I bought this book because one flew over the cuckoo's nest was one of the best novels I've ever read. Unfortunately this book came nowhere close to it. The story lacks direction. I wanted to stop reading after every chapter but continued in the hope that all the nonsense was leading to a masterful ending. It never came. What did come was completely bizarre and makes me feel that the author didn't know how else to end the book. Read one flew over the cuckoo's nest and pretend it was someone else who wrote this book.