“He remembered an episode of sleepwalking, when he became trapped inside his own bathroom, unable to locate the door handle.”
This work surely is THE great Pandemic Classic fiction to end all such fictions, lockdowned or now set free, the most rumbustiously adept fiction that has been or ever likely to be inspired or even exspired by such a co-vividness as our English version of the worldwide Pandemic and its induced dreaming — a mosh pit of Rabelaisian, grotesque, satirical, absurdist events, legends and people connecting a huge landscape-travelling pipe called Old Grumbler, built to cope with the historic Great Drown, too larger-than-life to check my lacunae of memory, connected somehow with the city sewage conduits of Bazalgette, connected, too, with a lovelorn schoolteacher, coming here to deal with his plastic-mutated inheritance following his aunt’s death during the Pandemic in a community of Morris dancers and yokels […] an endlessly attritional lifetime of just a few seconds between two pratfalls […] and featuring a West Country Music Festival postponed in May 2020 (yes, that fateful date, as if prophesied retroactively), and a detailed panoply of the various restrictions laid on us English people, letting in the infiltrating insidious ghosts as well as the confidence tricksters that shafted our poor schoolteacher and much more you would not credit till you have experienced this Insole work! Needs the widest possible audience to come out of their doomed lairs and celebrate it, or to take it back into their eternal lockdowns and chuckle over and wonder at its somehow believable prose style’s literary persuasions and variety sideshows. Applaud it at your doors daily. Meanwhile, I wonder whether you have already become the goosed or the gooser. The supernatural plum or the one who stoned it.
THE DOOMED HOUSE OF ABRAXAS Publication 2021
My previous reviews of COLIN INSOLE
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