Robbins' Latest Trip Takes His Readers To Timbuktu

It's amazing what intellectual smoke rings Tom Robbins can blow while wearing his old lounging jacket and puffing a Cuban cigar.

The free-spirited bard of the misty, moisty Northwest lights up every Thursday evening - "magazine night" in the Robbins household - while he peruses some of the 30 magazines he subscribes to (Tricycle, a bimonthly for American Buddhists, is his favorite). He's always in search of new ideas, new ways of perceiving this strange passage we call life.

Or, sometimes, very old ways of perceiving, ways that our high-tech, consumer-driven society long ago has forgotten - or never knew in the first place. Such was the nugget that Robbins unearthed in a science magazine a few years ago, the idea that propels his new novel, "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" (Bantam, $23.95), which arrives in local bookstores this week.

It seems that the Dogon and the Bozo, two remote tribes in the landlocked West African nation of Mali, share a belief system based on their long-held knowledge that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has a smaller twin, Sirius B, which is invisible to the naked eye but orbits its celestial companion. European astronomers with telescopes didn't confirm the existence of Sirius B until 1862, but the Dogon and Bozo - whose ancestral roots are in Libya and Egypt, respectively - have known it for eons.

"The geiger counter in my mind just began to ping," recalls Robbins of that fateful magazine night. "I knew I was on to something, and it just had to be examined."

To make matters really uncomfortable, that examination had to take place in Timbuktu. Yes, there really is a Timbuktu, though the name has been so long synonymous with the geographically unimaginable that most folks attach it to legend rather than the sun-blasted back-of-beyond in central Mali. But while Europe was mired in the Dark and Middle Ages, Timbuktu's location at the crossroads of Sahara caravan trade made it one of the world's intellectual capitals, an oasis of erudition with a great library and university.

"I'd wanted to go all my life because I'm a romantic," explained Robbins in a recent chat at his writing studio in La Conner. "And what could be more exotic than Timbuktu? This book gave me the impetus - plus, I could write it off on my taxes."

Robbins and Alexa, his companion of 7 1/2 years who became his wife last March, were warned repeatedly by the State Department not to go.

"Ten tourists were killed there (in December 1990)," he explained, a grim smile lighting his face, "and we were there just two months later."

Which may be why they were the only guests in Timbuktu's sole Western-style hotel ("For four days, we were the economy of the entire city"); or why they were besieged by hordes of would-be guides ("My intuition took over - I chose Pascal because he looked exactly like Magic Johnson, though not as tall, of course"); and why, on their last night in town, a sword-carrying Taureg tribesman shrieked all night outside their door ("He took our mild expression of interest in a camel ride to his desert encampment as a binding contract").

But the research got done, and Robbins has somehow managed to knead and stuff it all into his sixth highly improbable but weirdly persuasive novel.

"Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" is set in near-future Seattle and involves the professional and romantic entanglements of one Gwendolyn Mati, a beautiful, money-driven stockbroker of less-than-impeccable ethics whose Filipino father is a dope-smoking bongo player and whose Welsh-born mother, a poet manque, committed suicide under murky circumstances.

There's more, of course. The baroque ensemble of characters includes: Gwen's best friend, Q-Jo Huffington, Seattle's leading tarot-card reader with a side business watching slide shows in the homes of "travel bores"; the apparently dipso Dr. Motofusa Yamaguchi, who arrives in Seattle touting a cancer cure administered through a jade-and-crystal enema nozzle; Larry Diamond, a former stock-market whiz who recently had his "brain redone (with a) little cognitive redecorating" in Timbuktu; and Gwen's "assumed beau," Belford Dunn, a logger-turned-realtor who owns a macaque monkey trained as a jewel thief.

Running through this is Diamond's theory that the Dogon and Bozo are actually on to something: namely, that amphibian aliens from the Sirian neighborhood have visited us - whether telepathically or by space-born spores is unclear - "as part of a benign scheme to free us from the tyranny of the historical continuum and reunite our souls with the other-dimensional . . . ."

Somehow, in Robbins' telling, it comes out sounding almost half-right, even if half-baked.

Which is not to suggest that Robbins has lost any of the seriousness about political, religious and social issues that underlies his riotous fictional style. Indeed, besides his perennial targets - organized religion, capitalist excess and sociopolitical conformity - Robbins' new novel lobs rhetorical grenades at his natural allies on the left who have become mired in the slough of political correctness and its associated creeds, such as multiculturalism.

So how's this?

". . . America has always been multicultural, but until fairly recently the nation was a symbolic pot in which various peoples were metaphorically melted, blending into one rich alloy . . . Nowadays, however, it seems few immigrants are inclined to assimilate. They bring their native cultures with them . . . refusing to learn to speak English and getting angry when the social institutions of their adopted land fail to address them in their indigenous tongues."

The result, he writes, is a "state of victimization; a selfish, self-pitying, self-perpetuating state insidiously exploited by leftists for their own political ends."

Has America's one-time hippie novelist, now a comfortable 62, been reading too much National Review on those Thursday magazine nights?

No way. As always, Robbins is railing against barriers and limits - both intellectual and social - no matter what shade they come in.

"The tyranny of the dull mind has always been my enemy . . . and the dull mind has never had a more perfect flowering than in political correctness," Robbins declared with all the passion his mild demeanor generates. "Political correctness is practiced by people who aren't nimble-minded enough to make distinctions."

He was only warming up.

"And ultimately it's thoroughly dishonest, because - sooner or later, if you're doctrinaire or dogmatic - your dogma will come in conflict with the truth. And in every case I've ever seen, the truth loses out and dogma wins."

So Tom the Iconoclast has not left us at all. And even though he's taken on the trappings of mainstream stability - he's finally settled into marriage and a cozy home overlooking Puget Sound; his son Fleetwood has graduated from college and is on his own - Robbins says he's now ready for "some changes and big adventures."

Such as?

"I'm ready to explore Vietnam," says the one-time war protester (with a scalp wound to prove it). "I'm ready to imbibe some of the South American hallucinogens I've yet to try.

"I also think there are a lot of stones still unturned in Africa" - he's going back, he says, to investigate the metaphysical systems there that rival the major religions of West and East - "and I'm going to explore shorter fiction for awhile.

"There are still rivers left to raft."

---------------------- APPEARANCES BY ROBBINS ----------------------

Tom Robbins will autograph copies of "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" from 7 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St. (624-6600). Robbins also will read from his work as part of Bumbershoot's literary arts program on Friday, Sept. 2, in the Bagley Wright Theatre at Seattle Center. Robbins' presentation will begin at approximately 9:30 p.m., following readings by six other writers that begin at 7:15 p.m.