Anti-hero

In Competition No. 2417 you were given the opening: ‘He was twenty-three and oh! so agonisingly conscious of the fact. The train came bumpingly to a halt …’ and invited to add 150 or fewer words launching a sensitive and inadequate anti-hero on his fictional adventures. Denis Stone, Huxley’s passenger in Crome Yellow, was the first of a line of maladroit youths whose last mutation was Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon. (I reread both books this year and found that the Huxley held up better.) The genre — what Mr Scogan in Crome Yellow calls ‘a novel about the wearisome development of a young man’s character’ — seems to have died out. Commendations to Noel Petty, Alanna Blake and Alan Millard. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and D.A. Prince has the bonus fiver.

…shaking organic roquette from his ciabatta, and making him drop Caring Mars, the magazine for men wishing to confront their genetic programming. Gumley Parva already! He clutched his mobile, and scanned the platform. Susan, knowing he was hopeless with directions and inarticulate in taxis, had promised to meet him. Today’s horoscope for Virgos boded well; he’d picked the lucky purple shirt, Armani socks — feel-good clothes, just as Bodywise, the magazine for men wishing to maximise their visual success, advised. But where was Susan? Breathing in deeply to dispel panic, a hint he’d discovered on Makeovers with Attitude, a favourite TV programme for men who want wow-factor, he had started to text her when a tweed-suited giant, hauled by a drooling St Bernard, approached. ‘Denis?’ he barked, the dog gazing enviously at his master. ‘Susan’s chap?’