Soccer's off Book

Ever since his comic-sinister debut The Antipope--published for the first time in 1981, or 2 BD(Before Discworld)--Robert Rankin has repeatedly returned to that most haunted region of mythic England: Brentford. Snuff Fiction is the biography of local entrepreneur Doveston (1949-2008) as seen by lifelong friend and enemy Edwin, beginning with richly comic evocations of 1950s schoolboy folklore. Like lurking water-vipers in the park: "If you took a piddle in the boating lake, they would swim up the stream of pee and enter your knob." Doveston's insanely ambitious schemes begin with house-wrecking dope parties and the doomed 1967 Brentstock rock festival, with Edwin the scapegoat for every disaster. Those resisting the inexorable Doveston rise to wealth and power have accidents involving dynamite. Presently he's making nefarious deals with our secret Government, culminating in a millennium party at Castle Doveston where celebrities like Michael Jackson meet sticky ends. Rankin produces a fascinating flow of misinformation about puberty, gypsies (native language Esperanto), yo-yos (is there a manoeuvre called "splitting the beaver"?), Brentford's many ethnic quarters (e.g. Mexican, Navajo, Kalahari Bushmen), rhyming slang (Richard= Richard Dadd= mad) and snuff-sniffing. The awful secret of the Millennium Bug is revealed. Uninhibitedly anarchic farce, full of bizarre verbal inventiveness and dreadful old jokes. Read it and sneeze. --David Langford