A curious little fantasy, [Travels to the Enu]. Its plot is the merest peg from which hang the author's crowded thoughts on life's futility. The narrator, Orlando, recounts his adventures aboard an absurd, "no frills" cruise ship, S.S. Katherine Medici, out of Southampton bound for Sarawak. Once at sea, the crew of cutrate cutthroats set about robbing and murdering passengers, an amusement halted when this ship of fools suddenly founders. Orlando and several other passengers survive to reach an island in habited by naked cannibals who strongly resemble "hominid baboons"—the Enu….

The portrayal of the male Enu's easy life and the female's easier virtue affords occasionally clever swipes at just about everything and everybody, including the CIA, the KGB, Opus Dei, abortion, Margaret Thatcher, the Royal Navy, and of course, nuclear armament. With marvelous irony, the author quotes Von Clausewitz' sincere belief in the humaneness of...