My buddy Jim loaned Tom Robbins’ Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates several weeks ago. He explained to me at the time, “most people say the first Tom Robbins book they read is their favorite. This is mine.” My only experience with Tom Robbins is a hyper ability to confuse him with Tim Robbins. Clearly it was time to become familiar with the guy who did NOT pitch like a girl in Bull Durham.

At the time, I was still in the midst of figuring out whether I wanted to read The Sot-Weed Factor. At one point I read the first 30 pages of Fierce Invalids, only to go running back to The Sot-Weed Factor like a girl a couldn’t dump. Finally , I gave it up in earnest and started Invalids fresh.

The book is about a CIA agent named Switters, a ball of contradiction. He’s a pacifist, but he carries a gun. He’s a ladies man, but he’s attracted to innocence, so much so that his love interests are a Lolita-like 16 year old step sister and Nun. He’s a pragmatist, but he believes in voodoo and curses (to HILARIOUS effects).

In short, he’s a fairly unique creation. I imagined Johnny Depp from the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If you like Switters, you’ll probably like the book.

As for plot, well… readers of this blog know I don’t like to regurgitate plot for purposes of review. Let’s just say that it involves Prophecy, the Catholic church, and occasional anal sex with nuns. Despite the startling simlarities (y’know, except for the anal sex thing), I enjoyed it much more than The Da Vinci Code (though it predates Dan Brown’s dud by several years).

My final feelings on the book a fairly ambivalent. The characters are all well drawn, highly original creations. The plot… didn’t move me and felt like a contrived series of coincidences designed to get an odd group of people to intereact. I enjoyed it, I thought it was funny, but in the end it seems somehow forgettable. Which is not to say I’ve forgotten anything about it, but rather that I feel I will forget about it someday.