The only novel by the playwright Tom Stoppard – and a completely bonkers one! Surreal, off-the-wall; you choose the phrase – but it’s also funny and poignant, and I suspect says quite a lot about the young 1966 Stoppard who wrote it just after finished Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Stoppard offers us a cast of characters forged from an imagination let loose, with them interacting in a patchwork of crazy incidents – a number of which are undoubtedly beyond the suggestive.
Unlike anything I’ve ever read (perhaps it being a wackier story in the ilk of The Onion Eaters is as close as I can come) if you wanted to be diverted by a book that didn’t take itself at all seriously – and therefore which didn’t require you to do so either – then Malquist & Moon might fit the bill…
If you can get hold of it, that is. I found my copy in the Remainders Room of Waterstones. Enough said.
Ian Gouge - Writer 