Paul Bryant Aug 12, 2011

liked it bookshelves: novels

's review

They say that LSD was first synthesisterised in 1938, so it couldn't be that. But opium was imbibed in British society as we know from Thomas de Quincy up to Sherlock Holmes, so I'm going with opium.



This strange novel is a phantasmagoria which begins as a surrealistic spoof of Boy's-Own detective adventures in which our hero infiltrates the central council of the evil anarchists who are bent on destroying human society. Gathering more absurd elements (elephant chases through central London, medieval dance raves), it ends up as some kind of incoherent religious parable. The only sense I could make of it was that the message is Hindu - all of the world is divine, all of the world is God, all of the world is God dancing joyously with herself. That's about it, if anyone can nail it down more than that, I'm all ears.



As I read this, two things struck me, aside from thinking GK Chesterton's cocoa had been spiked with acid - I thought of an Arthur Penn movie from 1966 called The Chase, which begins conventionally and gets weirder and wilder as it progresses - must see that one again. And I thought that I've never come across so many beards in a single novel - maybe GK was a male facial hair fetishist - every character, and they're ALL men, has their beard or lack of beard carefully noted, so many beards there are that each time I opened my copy I thought I heard sociologists singing folk songs.



In one word : bonkers.