"Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel" by Drew Gummerson

Narrated in the anonymous second person, present tense, this week in the life of dishwasher employed at the hotel who, like Walter Mitty, repeatedly escapes from his dead-end squalor into a world of fantasy is hilarious.

The 2nd person narration creates a feeling of empathy (please, not identity, 'your' life is too sad and sordid for that) with the narrator as he fails again and again to improve his sex-life (“It is a long time since you have made love to a woman, possibly as long as two years or if it may even be as long as eight if the woman being in the same room as yourself is the deciding factor.”; Monday. At work. A shambles within a shambles.). Somehow, every attempt to hook up with a hot woman (or even a hunky man) ends in an explicit (but squalid rather than erotic) and humiliating disaster. 

He remembers his past: bullied at school, living in a shopping mall after his dad murdered his mother, friendless as university, an unconsummated relationship with a performance artist in America, a brief marriage ... No wonder that he tells tall tales to his colleagues and seeks solace in building wish-fulfilment pipe-dreams of his glorious future.

He then embellishes these excursions into the world of make-believe. They become more and more convoluted, gloriously so, as he doubles down. For example, when he imagines being kidnapped and held to ransom but left to rot when not only relatives but even a crowdfunding pages doesn’t raise the money. Or this part of a sentence: “You are considering purchasing a Russian bride although you know you will not because you will purchase one that does not like you and she will sit in the corner glowering at you, smoking strong Russian cigarettes that sting your eyes, or she will read long psychological novels by Dostoevsky and Gogol and she will not even glower at you which will be even more painful especially as you have rung the agent, Sergei, who used to be in the KGB, and Sergei has told you that she doesn't come with a refund option or a money back guarantee.” (Friday morning. Glory. Love is in the Air.) 

And there are some outrageous puns:

• “Another day, another douleur” (Monday: The Flamingo Hotel. Monday morning. A win win situation.)
• “Peter and John, the co-joined twins, stand shoulder to shoulder by the fridges.” (Monday. At work. A shambles within a shambles.)
• “He can dissect a deadly blowfish as easily as other people cut the mustard.” (Sunday night. The End.)

I've been struggling to find comparisons. I think this is the first comic novel I have encountered that uses the second person. Is the humour Rabelaisian? The disastrous biography reminded me of Voltaire's Candide. The rambling discursiveness reminded me of Tristram Shandy. There was a hint of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. 

Selected quotes:

• “You are an ant upon the globe, lacking significance as much as you lack a purpose.” (Monday: The Flamingo Hotel. Monday morning. A win win situation.)
• “You can only think that your affair started at a low point in your life although this low point is hard to pinpoint as there have rarely been any high points.” (Monday. At work. A shambles within a shambles.)
• “Why do you have to make these changes today? That is the beauty of days. There are always other ones.” (Monday. To the end of the day. The Birdland Bar.)
• “She licks you, starting at the big toe and working her way slowly up your body, even including your bumhole which only your pet dog Sparky has ever licked (an event which both of you regretted)” (Tuesday lunchtime. This Sporting Life.)
• “It made you contemplate how much sperm you had wasted in your life. It was a lot. More than a bucket full but not as much as a swimming pool. Somewhere between the two.” (Tuesday lunchtime. This Sporting Life.)
• “You add making love to Peggy-Sue to your list of things to do before you die. This list you keep on a roll of shiny toilet paper you stole from Paddington train station toilets after you'd been chased there by a gang of angry skinheads. It has over two and a half thousand items on it. Sometimes you take it out and weep.” (Wednesday evening. The Man in a Pink Suit. With a bum on his face.)
• “It was your foreskin that saved your life. Not many people can say that.” (Thursday afternoon. The forsaken foreskin. Part 2.)
• “And the tears form in your eyes because on your best days you have never been as good as second best.” ( Friday, at work. The Greatest Love of All. Polye Thylene.)
• “The moon is out in full, like a dinner plate a small child has thrown up on.” (Friday night. Your Love is King. Part 2)
• “It was your counsellor at the nuthouse who gave you the copy of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In your drug-addled state you had confused it with Tyrannosaurus Rex and believed it to be yet another sequel to Jurassic Park.” (Sunday morning. the beginning of the end. some thoughts about death.)

Comic genius.

Drew Gummerson has also written:

• Me and Mickie James
• The Lodger
• Saltburn

July 2026

Published by Bearded Badger in 2020

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Behind the Scenes at the Museum" by Kate Atkinson

 

A wide-ranging family saga, alternating family history with the bildungsroman of a girl growing up above a pet shop in "one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster" (Ch 1).

The main thrust of the novel is narrated by Ruby in the present tense and describes her childhood (it starts at the moment of her conception in what is presumably a deliberate reference to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, an author cited two pages later) into adulthood within a dysfunctional family consisting of father George who has repeated affairs, mother Bunty who is eternally fed-up and particularly dislikes Ruby, clever but disaffected eldest sister Patricia, and permanently angry and violent elder sister Gillian. The extensions of the family - uncles and aunts and cousins and in-laws - are equally eccentric. 

And so we embark on a roller-coaster ride from tragedy to comedy and back again. Ruby, as a little girl and the youngest of the family, never quite understands what's going on, particularly about the family secret that is dripped into the narrative. She's always one step behind and wondering why (she wonders about so many things, for example: "Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears ...?  Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?"; Ch 9)

There are moments of hilarity. My favourites were the Scottish holiday from hell featuring two couples and an adultery, and a nightmarish wedding on the day that England won the FIFA Men's World Cup.

The main narrative is interleaved with what are called footnotes (although they range from a page or two to chapter length) told in the omniscient past tense. These are episodes in the family history. If you encounter Tristram Shandy at the start, I guess you must expect digression. I presume this added material is designed to show that even the behaviours of Ruby's family have genetic roots: the common themes seem to be adultery, disappearance and death and the fundamental uselessness of most of the menfolk. However, I found these excursions distracted me from the main narrative.

They weren't necessary. Ruby is a delightful character with a strong voice and an always-entertaining family. In the end I wasn't sure if I had finished a comic novel or a family saga (back to Sterne) but I was certain that I had enjoyed myself.

Selected quotes:

• "Given free choice from the catalogue offered by the empire of dreams on her first night as my mother, Bunty has chosen dustbins." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty feels there's something indulgent about parks, something wasteful - holes in existence filled with nothing but air and light and birds." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty's attitude to pain, or indeed, emotion of any kind,is to behave as if it sprang from a personality disorder." (Ch 1)
• "She likes the word 'acquaintance'. It sounds posh and doesn't have all the time-consuming consequences of friendship." (Ch 1)
• "Her eyebrows have risen so far they seem to be hovering above her head." (Ch 6)
• "Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together." (Fn 9)
• "Patricia ... is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself." (Ch 13)
• "Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about." (Ch 13)

The book won the 1995 Whitbread Debut Novel Award

January 2025; 382 pages

• Originally published by Doubleday in 1995
• My Black Swan paperback was issued in 1996

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

"Mimic" by Daniel Cole

 A serial killer is on the loose in London, recreating famous sculptures using the sometimes restructured bodies of his victims.

A disturbingly original, if slightly absurd, premise is followed by a chain of near misses and strange coincidences that make it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. And there is very little mystery about whodunnit. But the novel is more than rescued by a trio of wonderfully ridiculous policemen, creating an almost Keystone Cops flavour about the pursuit. I adored Detective Winter, who gets drunk and eats fast food.

Selected quotes

• "And so, the old man returned home to find Death slumbering in his chair, having come for him at last. But, thought the old man, is Death not merely another foe? A foe both weary and alone?" (Prologue; first lines)
• "'To be fair, the physique is a little different to yours,' Winter interjected, evidently still a little tipsy. 'You're a bit softer around the ... everything'." (Ch 5)
• "Winter removed his notebook and took a seat on the floor beside him, gazing up at the stained coffee tiles: 'How did anyone manage to spill coffee up there?' he asked. 'Boss threw it at someone he didn't like'. 'Who?' 'Me'." (Ch 9)
• "'It regards Henry's ... sexual orientation''Rita looked blank-er. 'What? Like which way up he did it?'" (Ch 17)
• "The Wet Dog would have been a more apt name for the dank little establishment on the banks of the canal, the musk originating from damp shoes, complemented by stale beer and the resident Doberman by the fireplace." (Ch 17)
• "People are shallow, simple creatures, and beauty no more than a tool to exploit that fundamental flaw - to fit in with a specific group, to project a deceptive impression of oneself, to attract a viable mate." (Ch 24)

Absurd and not in the least realistic ... but frequently hilarious and three of the most original detectives I think I have ever read. March 2022; 346 pages

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

"Less" by Andrew Sean Greer

 Arthur Less is a not-terribly-successful gay novelist. One ex-boyfriend is a famous poet, another ex-boyfriend is Freddy, the son of the Carlos who has been a frenemy of Arthur's all these years. Invited to Freddy's wedding to another man, Arthur decides the only way to avoid accepting is to be out of the country so he strings together a series of minor literary offers into a world tour: an interview in New York, a lecture in Mexico, a prize event in  Italy and so on. His experience are comic and tragic and most of all they are absurd (he is almost late to interview a more famous novelist because the clock in the hotel lobby isn't working and the publicist assumes Arthur is a woman; the novelist repeatedly vomits because of food poisoning etc). 

It is a gentle, rambling picaresque with some poignant observations on life from the perspective of a gay man growing old without a partner and some moments which prompted a chuckle (which is rather more than most 'comic' novels elicit from me). It is sweet and kind and amusing but, as is the common fault of picaresques, there is little structure and no drive: it is difficult to see that we are going anywhere until the last section, rather rapidly, attempts to make sense of it all. Otherwise, the most interesting thing about the book is that it occasionally lapses into the narrator talking directly to the reader; the mystery of the narrator's identity is not revealed until the end.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2018

There are some magical lines:

• "As he waits, around and around the room circles a young woman in a brown wool dress, a species of tweed humming-bird, pollinating first this group of tourists and then that one." (Less at First)
• "It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well." (Less at First)
• "There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very long road ... to your final place of rest. He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men." (Less Mexican)
• "The cruel checkmate logic of conversation" (Less French)
• "Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that's a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it's a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they're a triumph. Is this night a failure because it's going to end in an hour?" (Less Moroccan)
• "People use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old." (Less Moroccan)
• "We know there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings." (Less Moroccan)
• "With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining." (Less Indian)
• "By now he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost." (Less At Last).

Perhaps a little superficial but cute and clever. April 2021; 261 pages

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

"Vinegar Girl" by Anne Tyler

Kate is a forthright young lady with a 'take me or leave me' attitude. She lives with her scientist father and her flirty schoolgirl sister Bunny in a joyously bizarre household governed by dad's scientific 'systems' (such as making a nutrient balanced meat mash one day and eating it throughout the week). Her dad is reaching the end of many years research; his foreign research assistant Pyotr Shcherbakov is nearing the end of his three year immigration visa and dad is frantic that he will be deported. So he concocts a scheme in which Kate marries Pyotr for the immigration status. Which mortifies and infuriates Kate as much as Pyotr intrigues her.

The plot is (loosely) based on The Taming of the Shrew. The problem is that Petruchio in the original 'tames' his Kate as a man might break a horse and takes pride in being rough with her. Tyler has to make Pyotr at least a little bit likeable so that a modern reader can believe that Kate might come to like Pyotr and she doesn't have Shakespeare's expedient of making Kate 'shrewish' and 'unwomanly' so that his male patriarchal audience could despise her and root for Petruchio. That Tyler does such a great job is cause for celebration although she necessarily has to leave a lot of the old story behind.

Although both books share an acute observation of the little domestic routines of everyday life, this book is quite different from the other Tyler I have read: A Spool of Blue Thread. But they're both great in their own way. Vinegar Girl is much funnier though. There were moments of genius comedy, mostly found in the interaction of two people, especially Kate's reactions to the pre-schoolers she cares for. I loved it.

Two girls chatting:
"I could tell he wanted to ask me," one was saying, "because he kept clearing his throat in the way they do, you know? But then not speaking."
"I love when they're so shy," the other said
Perfectly observed dialogue including the 'you know' and 'I love when' rather than 'I love it when'. And perfect observation of courting men. Tyler really does have a soft spot for how hard it is to be a man. (p 4)

Pyotr's lunch: "two eggs and then a banana" a lover breadcrumb of his intentions. (p 9)

"She mistakenly kicked a tuft of grass instead of the bottle cap, and a child waiting for his turn at the swings looked startled." (p 78) This has nothing to do with advancing the plot and it doesn't really help character either but it is such a human moment that it adds more verisimilitude than a list of what is in Kate's pockets.

"this morning one of my boys sharpened his index finger in the pencil sharpener" (p 79) I was expecting Adam, who says this, to have more of a role, perhaps turning up at the church to announce that he loved Kate so she realised what a mistake she was making. I must stop writing my own plots.

"Inwardly he was formulating thoughts every bit as complicated and layered as her own." The moment when Kate realises this rather comical sounding foreigner who can't speak English very well is actually a person in his own right. This works at every level. (p 104)

"vulnerable-looking bare neck" (p 137) In A Spool of Blue Thread the character Stem is nicknamed after his vulnerable-looking neck. Is this something in Tyler?

"Kate almost looked behind her for someone else; it seemed so unlikely that she could be 'our' Kate." (p 180)

"I've always had a very good relationship with my mice"
"Well, better with them than with no one, I suppose" 
(p 243)

March 2017; 263 pages

"Shylock is my name" by Howard Jacobson

The book starts with the sentence: "It is one of those better-to-be-dead-than-alive days you get in the north of England in February, the space between the land and sky a mere letter box of squeezed light, the sky itself unfashionably banal." (p 1) This seems to summarise the rather depressing, not to mention convoluted, story to come. A rich philanthropist, Simon Strulovich, whose second wife is an invalid following a stroke, whose daughter has been trying to run off with men since the age of thirteen, meets Shylock, whose wife Leah is dead, whose daughter Jessica has run off with a man. Yers, the real Shylock, at least the real character in the play, who seems to have acquired flesh (and more than a pound). Tangential to all this is Plurabelle, daughter of another very rich man, who repeatedly requires her suitors to guess which of several choices her whim has alighted on this time.

One of the problems I found was that I just didn't really care about the problems of these rich men worried about their spoilt daughters. And much of the humour seemed heavy handed. And there was a lot of theology.

The half way turning point occurs when Strulovich asks that his sixteen-year-old daughter's much older footballer husband undergoes circumcision as the price of his daughter's hand. A two page dissertation follows on the theology of circumcision: is it a mutilation or not? And circumcision becomes the proxy for the pound of flesh.

Possibly for good reasons, Shylock really doesn't like Christians. He is very apt to talk about 'Christians' in generalities. For example, Shylock claims that "they can't see a Jew without thinking they have to tell him a joke" (p 63), "they feel no embarrassment in proclaiming that the proper Jew is a wandering Jew" (p 64), that gentiles "haven't been able to draw their imaginations from us sexually for centuries" (p 69). Shylock also points out that Jesus was Jewish and claims: "Charity is a Jewish concept. So is mercy." And it is not just Shylock. Strulovich explains to his daughter why a gentile husband cannot be good enough for her: "your intelligence is five thousand years old, they were born yesterday. They can only think one thing at a time; you can think a dozen." (p 206) I found this repeated drawing of battle lines between Jews and Christians exhausting; no character seemed able to see beyond their tribe.

A difficult book. Perhaps I needed to know the play more intimately to appreciate the finer points. But in the end the characters seemed stereotypical and the endless philosophising just seemed endless.

March 2017; 277 pages

Some nice lines:

• "With water you did wash away the foul impurities of death." (p 54) has a slightly archaic sentence construction (the insertion of 'did') which makes you pay greater attention to the sentence and thus imparts a little extra emphasis.
• "On occasions she even cried over their incompatibility of whim." (p 73)
• "his friend, still bedwarmed, so to speak, with the perfumes of Plurabelle still on him" (p 73)

Other novels which adapt a Shakespeare play and are reviewed in this blog include:

Vinegar Girl by Ann eTyler which rewrites The Taming of the Shrew: very funny
Nutshell by Ian McEwan rewrites Hamlet and is told from the perspective of a not quite yet born baby
The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson rewrites A Winter's Tale and is mostly brilliant
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood is set in a prison and rewrites The Tempest: fabulous

"The Mating Season" by P G Wodehouse

Bertie Wooster has to pretend to be Gussie Fink-Nottle and Gussie has to pretend to be Bertie to resolve the broken engagements of:

• Hollywood film starlet and Bertie's childhood friend Corky and Esmond Haddock, a man who cannot stand up to his five disapproving aunts;
• Corky's brother Catsmeat who loves Esmond's niece Gertrude;
• Gussie's betrothed Madeleine Bassett who, if Gussie chucks her in favour of his grwoing infatuation with Corky who is playing hard to get with Esmond, will turn her attention to Bertie whom, she thinks, loves her;
• Village policeman PC Dodds, sworn enemy to Corky since he had locked up her dog,  and parlourmaid Queenie who is daughter to Jeeves' uncle Silversmith.

Naturally, the paths of true love are beautifully entangled.

A classic Jeeves and Wooster farce written in Wodehouse's perfect prose including the lines:

• "dragons are one thing, and aunts are another"
• "it was plain at a glance that the passage of time had done nothing to gruntle him"
• "I wouldn't have believed ... that anybody ... could be such an authority on the film world as is Mrs Clara Wellbeloved. She knows much more about it than I do, and I'll have been moving in celluloid circles [love that image!] two years come Lammas Eve [love the archaism]. She knows exactly how many times everybody's been divorced and why, how much every picture for the last twenty years has grossed, and how many Warner brothers there are. She even knows how many times Artie Shaw has been married, which I'll bet he couldn't tell you himself. She asked if I had ever married Artie Shaw, and when I said No, seemed to think I was pulling her leg or must have done it without noticing. I tried to explain that when a girl goes to Hollywood she doesn't have to marry Artie Shaw, it's optional, but I don't think I convinced her."
• "in vino what's-the-word"
• "I told her more. In fact I told her all. When I had finished, she laughed like a hyena and also, for girls never make sense, let fall a pearly tear or two."
• "I don't know anything more sickening than being baffled by an unforeseen stymie at the eleventh hour"
• "I made for it like a man on a walking tour diving into a village pub two minutes before closing time."

"A tall, drooping man, looking as if he had been stuffed in a hurry by an incompetent taxidermist."

Beautiful stuff by the man who also wrote the equally brilliant Aunts Aren't Gentlemen.

Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.

October 2016; 272 pages

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

"Aunts aren't gentlemen" by P.G.Wodehouse

Bertie Wooster has spots on his chest and his doctor advises him to go down to the country for peace and quiet and fresh air and exercise. But at the cottage organised by his Aunt Dahlia he becomes embroiled in trying to fix a horse race by stealing a cat whilst simultaneously trying not to get married to an ex-fiancee who wants to improve him. In the end it takes his man Jeeves to sort out the mess.

Written as last as 1974 yet presumably set in that innocent inter-war period when it still mattered if you had been to Eton, this is classic Wodehouse. The joy is that it is written in the voice of Wooster, chivalrous but hapless man about town, who dilettantes about with foreign expressions and snatches of poetry but has never heard of Tolstoy. Time and again Wodehouse raises a chuckle by transforming the English language.

Cliches are renewed, often by the simple expedient of Wooster applying abbreviations, as when he explains how Porter "earned the daily b"; "so far ... so g".

He also renews cliches by simply replacing words so that 'I shuddered from head to toe' becomes "I shuddered from hair-do to shoe-sole".

He uses English history to illustrate concepts. When trying to make the point that red hair is associated with high blood pressure he says: "The first Queen Elizabeth had red hair, and look what she did to Mary Queen of Scots."

On the other hand he is sometimes hilariously ignorant. When asked if he has read 'Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son' he reflects "well, of course I hadn't. Bertam Wooster does not read other people's letters. If I were employed in the Post Office, I wouldn't even read the postcards."

He exaggerates images. A dour doctor has a face which resembles "a frog which has been looking on the dark side since it was a slip of a tadpole"; if Aunt Dahlia "ever turned into a werewolf, it would be one of those jolly breezy werewolves whom it is a pleasure to know." "He couldn't have been more emotional if he had been a big shot in the Foreign Office and I a heavily veiled woman diffusing a strange exotic scent whom he had caught getting away with the Naval Treaty"; "Talk of drawing his fangs. His dentist will have to fit him with a completely new set"; "Cook in his present frame of mind wouldn't recognise reason if you served it up to him in an individual plate with watercress round it".

He pretends not to know things. The blood pressure sphygmomanometer becomes "that rubber thing around my biceps"; "I wasn't a modern Casa something. Not Casabianca. That was the chap who stood on the burning deck. Casanova. I knew I'd get it.".

He interrupts the narrative to ask questions directly of the reader: "And with no further ado - or is it to-do? - I never can remember".

He can mix metaphors with aplomb: "What asses horses are"; "I am a good mixer who is always glad to shake hands with new faces".

He becomes literal with metaphor. ""She has been known to ask me if I have a home of my own and, if I have. why the hell I don't stay in it".

He is also literal with the English language: "there happened at the moment to be no passers-by but if any passers had been by ..."

These are just a few examples. The book is stuffed as full of these things as a goose whose liver is destined for foie gras. When you add in the elements of a classic farce and some utterly preposterous characters, Wodehouse is pure, escapist, comic gold.

Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.

August 2016; 184 pages

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