The world had always seemed an indecipherable place to Spivet, but that event has made it infinitely more so. The year before, we come slowly to learn, he was involved in an accident with a gun in the barn in which his beloved brother died (he didn't pull the trigger exactly, but his mind was certainly on higher things). There is, of course, a reason for Spivet's mapping. In design, it appeals to the same contemporary nostalgia for the niceties of between-the-war text books and all things Baden-Powell. The result is a wilfully original and diverting book, full of carefully penned ephemera, a bit like Schott's Miscellany written as a confessional novel.
Many of these maps illustrate the margins of his story, along with all sorts of other digressions and diagrams. His co-ordinates are all over the place: he maps the flight paths of bats around his house, the dynamics of his sister shucking corn cobs, the spread of McDonald's in northern Montana, the rising waters of the local lake, which he believes is set to inundate the town. Spivet lives on Coppertop Ranch in the wilds of Montana and it quickly becomes clear that the cartography he is interested in is not the stuff of the Ordnance Survey. To this end, he places us in the head of Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet (TS for short), a 12-year-old prodigy with a compulsion to make maps of the world in order better to understand it. Larsen is undeniably talented, though his unique vision and style make for a love-it or hate-it proposition.O pening Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of TS Spivet brings to mind that useful old instruction of Mark Twain: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Larsen wants to transport his reader to something like the world of Huck Finn, that place of adventure where adult codes are suspended. For the most part, they work well, though sometimes the extra material confuses more than clarifies. Dense notes, many dozens of illustrations and narrative elaborations connected to the main text via dotted lines are on nearly every page. All this is interwoven with the journals of his mother and her effort to come to grips with the matriarchal line of scientists in the family. Along the way, he meets a possibly sentient Winnebago, a homicidal preacher, a racist trucker and members of the secretive Megatherium Club, among many others. receives a call from the Smithsonian informing him that he has won the prestigious Baird award, prompting him to hop a freight train to Washington, D.C., to accept the prize. After the death of T.S.'s brother, Layton, T.S. Fans of Wes Anderson will find much to love in the offbeat characters and small (and sometimes not so small) touches of magic thrown into the mix during the cross-country, train-hopping adventure of a 12-year-old mapmaking prodigy, T.S.
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