MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT

IN 1938, two rival U.S. expeditions head to a newly discovered Mayan temple in the remote Honduras jungle. One has been sent by a multimillionaire who wants to dismantle the building, ship it to America and put it back together. The other is a Hollywood film unit intending to use the temple as the backcloth for a screwball comedy.

A stand-off between the two teams results in them being marooned there for two decades, during which one is taken over by a German Nazi war criminal on the run.

The temple may be haunted by Mayan gods and it contains a substance that attracts the interest of the CIA.

But what starts off as a fun, madcap mystery — inspired, says the author, by Werner Herzog’s jungle- set film Fitzcarraldo — rapidly becomes overcomplicated, with too many characters and subplots, as though Beauman himself has imbibed some ancient hallucinogenic and got carried away.

His often funny and clever verbal pyrotechnics do not compensate for an overlong and stodgy story.