Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Joe Joplin is a highly educated ne’er do well, who has recently become a father, is living with his partner April, for whom he has absolute respect and, seemingly, despite his wishes to the contrary, no sexual relations. He’s an admin worker, though with academic leanings, at Birmingham University. Very much in the manner of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, the novel begins with a talk to be delivered to a scholarly body. He fumbles it, much in the manner of Amis’ anti-hero. The cause is not, as with Jim Dixon, drunkenness (though there’s plenty of that in the events to come) but the intrusion of the sasquatch, initially a priapic and rather violent monster, visible only to Joe, who continues to arrive at uncomfortable moments in the story, and with whom Joe must finally make his peace.

What function does the creature serve? Is it conscience? Or, in a related way, is it the debilitating self-criticism to which Joe subjects himself? Could it be, as an elderly professor present at the conference suggests, a function of time and perhaps mortality?

Eternal themes for any writer, Rick Hughes subjects them to uproarious treatment as Joe steers his hapless course from being sacked by the University to labouring on Birmingham’s Wholesale Vegetable Market to an ill-fated gambling night and finally to a four-day party. It is here, on a stag do at a country residence deep in the wooded west, that we meet Joe’s boon companions – the saintly Theodore, the stalwart Ching, the perceptive Peter, co-father and bandsman Laurie and finally the groom-to-be Bing, whose charm and charisma rise above the drug-fuelled excesses of the weekend. The extremities of which do deliver the reader a kind of shock. The absurdism of which teaches the young men to value what they have – most prominently, one another.