Number 18 - Notes For a Young Gentleman - Toby Litt

Toby Litt is a bit of a literary chameleon.  In his 12 novels so far published, he rarely touches the same genre twice. King Death and Corpsing both broadly fall into crime fiction, but are still very different novels. His book titles so far (fiction) have been in alphabetical order (Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpsing, Deadkidsongs etc)

This is his latest novel. And it's weird.

He's written weird stuff in the past.  Hospital was utter chaos from start to finish and ran through pretty much every posible genre.  I love that book even though I'm pretty certain I didn't undertand most of it and there are many levels to the story I missed entirely.

This one makes Hospital look normal in comparison.

Written mostly in a lot of very short paragraphs.

          With different timestreams indicated by different depths of indentation of the paragraphs.

Sometimes words are in a different colourred font to the rest of the sentence. The reason for all this is almost explained near the end of the book

The story starts off about a young gentleman parachuting into rural Englend on a quest to assassinate Winston Churchill on behalf of the Fuhrer.

          But he lands in a tree and has to cut himself free, injuring his foot. He passes out and wakes                 in a strange house in the middle of the local woods known as the Darkenings. His rescuer is
          a local woman witch named Olwyn and she appears to have miraculous powers.          

          From there things get less clear. Clarity of narrative is not the author's purpose in this book.

In lesser hands this book could have turned into a complete disaster.  The storyline goes all over the place, and time.  Anachronisms abound. But Litt is too careful a writer for those to be accidental. The book becomes more about the flow of words and the crashing of one sentence into the next than about any story. 

Odd sentences that don't link to the paragraphs above and below are rife.

In its best sequences, this book flows and washes over the reader like a tide. 

It drags you through the pages in a freewheeling whirling dervish of words. 

It surpasses my meagre ability to describe the feelings it induces.

With its extremely off the wall style of writing and experimental text layout, this isn't a book for the casual reader.  It needs some effort to get into it.  Like a magic eye painting, you have to allow it to show you what it's about.

It would be very easy to dismiss this book as pretentious, but for me the quality of the writing pulls this out from that trap.

Some sample quotes

"Masturbation is a bit like buying oneself a birthday present -- one knows one is going to be pleased-ish with what one gets, but there's never any chance of surprise."

"Her skin appears to have been removed, scrunched up, slept on by elephants and then put back as it was before."

"When we have nothing else, breathing becomes a great pleasure. "

"I hear scissors repeating the first syllable of their name."

"Being buried alive felt inexplicably familiar, until I paid attention to the word familiar."

I finished this book last night and it's still not quite settled in my mind what any of it is about. But the experience of reading it, for me, was a pleasure unlike many others. I've certainly not read anything that quite compares to this book, in structure, plotting or narrative.

I honestly don't know what score to give it.  But, if you can put the effort in, this book will certainly reward you.

Toby Litt's A-Z of the writer of the A-Z can be found here

https://tobylitt.wordpress.com/ 

This book is available on Amazon or through SeagullBooks

http://www.seagullbooks.org/index.php?p=book_details&book_id=NzAz