Worse is to follow. A wealthy Parisian sybarite commissions Roswell to make bonking crash dummies of a man, a woman, a gorilla and a mastiff. It's as though the endearing Mouse and his Child have grown up to become pornographic adult toys. Having mastered his craft, Roswell goes on to make a crash dummy of a crucified Christ. At which point, his quest-companion, one Sarah Varley, declares that his 'soul must be skint'.
Sarah, an antiques dealer with a market stall, describes herself as being 'a medium in a small way', one who traffics in 'ghosts and the possessions, as often as not, of the dead'. So we know she is going to be just the person Roswell needs. She also has a bat tattoo on her left shoulder and she meets Roswell at the V & A where he's gone to photograph the selfsame bat, featured on an 18th-century Chinese bowl. The bat is a symbol of happiness. 'I just wanted that bat to take me aboard and fly me out of where I was in myself' is Roswell's realisation when he arrives at the tattoo parlour.
As in other Hoban novels, this one works on two levels - personal quest and social allegory. Roswell is a kind of 21st-century Everyman. His journey out of spiritual sterility is echoed by the novel's witty depiction of the loss of the sacred in art and, implicitly, in life. Great art works of the past are compared with such conceptual art works as a bunch of saturated tampons conceived by one Philippa Crutchley-Sweet.
At the heart of the novel is a mixture of the death of Orpheus, suggesting the destruction of wisdom and art by barbarism, and the gnostic version of Christianity in which instead of God becoming man to save mankind, corrupt man has to struggle towards God (or art) to save himself - in Roswell's case with the help of a woman, a memory of the Orpheus fountain, the hand of God and a bat tattoo.
There's enough serendipitous happenings in this novel to bring The Celestine Prophecy to mind, but Hoban grounds the fantastic in a London of actual churches, tattoo parlours, museums and timber merchants.
Bloomsbury have also re-issued Riddley Walker. Remember Riddley, the 'connection man'? The delight and importance of Hoban is the way he seeks to make the connections between our real, inner and mythical worlds. Hoban, I'd say, is the Connection Man for our times.
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