Book description
‘I like to hear his name, especially when he says it. His voice is rich
and dark, like those jams they sell in tiny pots at twice the price of
normal jars, and they call “preserves”, to justify the cost. I chose him
for his name, in fact - half Mayfair hairdresser and half Vatican
incumbent.’
So speaks Nial, a woman with a man’s name, and confused about her
gender - uncertain about most things, save her obsession with John-Paul.
She shares this obsession with modest Mary and conscientious Bryan. All
three lead secret lives. Mary, a conventional housewife with a
dream-home in the suburbs, is inflicting burns on her genitals and
stockpiling vibrators; Bryan, a mother-harried city clerk, updates his
Disaster Scrapbook and takes his snake to bed, seeking refuge from
Chaology and the horrors of the quantum revolution; Nial swaps sex for
blood-drenched dreams of an ex-Naxi butcher in the High Street. All seek
help and healing from the mysterious John-Paul, but is he sage and
saviour, or untrained unlicensed con-man?
In her powerful and hilarious new novel, Wendy Perriam mixes the
blackest of black comedy with a serious examination of madness in its
many forms - the religious excesses of miracles and visions; the crazy
chaos of modern phsyics; and especially the distortions of the
fifty-minute hour itself; those wild or weeping sessions on the
analyst’s couch. With her usual wit and gusto, she explores the murky
world of the psychologically disturbed - a world as comically bizarre as
it is genuinely tragic.
‘A screamingly funny book which almost blows the mind and will outrage
the prudish.’ Sunday Telegraph
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
