"Road Kill - The Duchess of Frisian Tun" by Pete Adams

This is the most experimental novel I have read for some time.

Frisian Tun is a posh street in Portsmouth, whose middle-class standards are maintained by the self-styled Duchess and a set of unwritten rules. Much of it is destroyed after a shoot-out involving tanks and rocket launchers. The action of the novel consists of an unlikely group of residents gathering together with a cub reporter (who loses his virginity) to discuss what happened in the street.

But that is like trying to describe the 'plot' of a Monty Python sketch mixed with seaside postcard humour.

It was also very funny in its repeated use of word-play. It was like one of those stand-up comedians who specialises in puns. No opportunity was missed to poke fun at the language used, to the extent that I couldn't tell if some words had simply been misprinted or or they had been deliberately mis-spelt (for example, the repeated use of the word ‘reined’ for ‘reigned’). Here are just a few examples:

• "It was in fact, a 2CV, which is twice as good as a CV."
• "It was a master class in denial, the core faith of his C of E (Church of Egypt) faith, De Nile."
• "a steamy, phonographic sex scene; just for the record." (Ch 18)

I was left scrabbling to try and find something else I had read that came anywhere close. It seemed to be a hybrid of the following:

• The Unlimited Dream Company by J G Ballard in which the respectable suburb of Shepperton erupts into an orgiastic fantasy
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne for the endless discursiveness and the repeated intrusion of the author.
• The anarchy of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter
• or the anarchy of a William Burroughs novel, such as Naked Lunch

Perhaps I should be looking further afield. The author tells me that he has been considered a literary version of Salvador Dali and it is hard to disagree on the evidence of this book. It left me wondering why the novel form is so unexperimental, compared to paintings, or films.

Was it enjoyable? It wasn't difficult to read and there were some very funny moments. The bizarre characters are well-drawn. But most of all it was liberating. It blew away the literary cobwebs and showed the possibilities of a novel, once you have dispensed with convention.

Selected quotes:

• "Jack thought for a while, which involved stopping as he was not a famed multitasker."
• "The passion had the potential to become frenzied, except Amanda had to help him with her buttons and finally her bra strap."
• "All that remained as evidence of the Duchess’s stately pile was a particularly un-stately pile of rubble, the shells of walls sticking up like empty teeth where fillings had long ago departed, the plumbing and cabling exposed as if dead nerves of a deceased body and a first floor bath tub, stubbornly reigned high and mighty, like a large nasal protuberance on a formerly proud face." (Ch 1)
• "his mother did not allow him to have a mobile phone for risk of brain tumours, always assuming there was sufficient brain residing in the Pimple skull for a tumour to attach itself" (Ch 5)
• "Amanda Austin, the mature cheese to Jack’s dry, powdery chalk" (Ch 10)

I am awarding it five stars because I think it achieved completely what I imagine the author set out to do.

February 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God