The first half of Philip Hensher’s new novel does a lot of chugging and clunking into gear. The opening pages feel like a cross between P. G. Wodehouse and Haruki Murakami, a curious, if not precisely auspicious combination. Hensher’s narrator works as an indexer, an enviably talented compiler of indexes for books such as Haddock: The Story of the Fish that Changed the World and a ‘windily impalpable, blustering, shapeless biography of Krafft-Ebing’. His wife has just left him, but he seems breezily indifferent. On the other hand, he can’t stop hiccupping.
The book is a love story. The twin engines propelling it are the narrator’s narcissistic pessimism — the source of so much that is great, but also wearying, in English humour — and his and his family’s unshareable grief (his sister, Frankie, was raped and murdered while still in her teens). It is a strange combination, and it never really stops being so.
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