Arcane motel rituals

Press, 30 August 1980, Page 17

Arcane motel rituals

Motel of the Mysteries. By David Macaulay. Illustrated by the author. Hutchinson, 1980, 96 pp. $11.50.

(Reviewed by.

A. K. Grant)

. This book is founded on 'an entertaining idea. The world perishes in: a cataclysm in 1985. (That is not the entertaining idea, although there are some who might find it so.) In' 4022 A.D. an explorer named Howard Carson stumbles across' the buried ruins of a motel, complete with one skeleton watching the Great Altar (a television set on a chest of drawers), and another lying in a polished white sarcophagus” (bath), wearing the “Ceremonial Head Dress”, (showercap). The bathroom, of course, is equipped with a “Sacred Um” (lavatory’), an d “Sacred Parchment” (toilet paper), “pieces of which were periodically placed in the um during the ceremony.” j l, “"And so on. Tire, idea is wellsustained. by the imaginative iilljistrations, and by the gentle whimsy

and satire of. the text. The targets of the satire are the solemn reconstructions of archaeology, and the odder aspects of human behaviour in motel society. . Marshall McLuhan asserted that television had made the world “a global village.” There is much stronger evidence 1 for- asserting .that the world has become a global motel. Nevertheless if this idea were to- be adapted for a satire on New Zealand society, it would be better to. make the buried institution archaelogically 'recovered a caravan, with .a line of buried cars behind it, and.two buried cars immediately to its .right, they having met- in a head-on collision. Archaeologists could, then interpret this as a- funeral - procession incorporating -a ritual akin to the Indian practice- of suttee; or alternatively as a' complicated ceremony involving human sacrifice and intended do. propitiate the demons inhabiting the Marsden Point refinery and the Petrocorp methanol plant. ;