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Sputnik Caledonia

Boys will be boys

Andrew Crumey
Picador, 553pp, £7.99,

Diana Hendry

Tuesday, 1st April 2008

Diana Hendry reviews Andrew Crumey's new novel

This is a novel that keeps you on your toes as it sputniks you through its various realities. Characters in part one reappear in part two. The science teacher Mr Tulloch turns into the mad professor Kaupff; Moira, baby-sitting and demonstrating the lotus posture (and her sky-blue knickers) in part one, becomes the dominatrix Rosalind of the Installation (also in lotus posture though with pale blue knickers) while Dorothy, the girl who gives Robbie his first kiss, becomes — well either his Installation landlady or the whore he falls in love with or maybe Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Still with me?

It’s a relief to get to something like real life again in part three and to find another boy — or maybe Every Boy, as he’s mostly known as Kid. Kid himself thinks that ‘everybody keeps being this new person, the same but different . . . in an infinite universe.’ Possibly this and the idea derived from Goethe that everything is connected is meant to be a comforting philosophy, but it’s not very sustaining.

A brio of a book though. One for the boys, big and little — and for those of us who wonder just what does go on inside a boy’s head.

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