*Winner of the Booker Prize 1972*

This delapidated old beauty of a book was one of my first ebay purchases. I'm still unsure how I feel about ebay and I'm even more unsure of how I'll feel about the book. From the cover blurbs the book sounds very experimental and perhaps even a little mental as phrases like 'deliberate collage' and 'bizarre combination of fiction, reconstructed history, social theory and sexual rumination' appear all over it. I'm thinking this work may be a more extreme bed fellow of Tom Robbins but only the reading will tell me more.

As the condition of this book is utterly dire already and won't be made any better by my reading it, I'll probably pass this on to someone else when I'm done as apposed to leaving it to the whims of the wild.

This poor old battered copy didn't survive it's final reading and I was literally throwing the pages away as I read them. It took me such a long time to read because the story was circuitous and 'psychedellic' meaning that it was incomprehensible and disjointed at times. I found it difficult to remember which protagonists were which and how they related to each other. The weaving of real life events into the narrative only served to confuse me more as I kept querying whether something was fact or fiction. Perhaps it would have been more obvious which was which if I'd read the book during it's early 70s hey day.

As usual adventures through the Booker prize are illuminating.