Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2587 you were invited to submit an opening to an imaginary novel so magnificently bad that it would repel any would-be reader.
This is an unashamed rip-off of the hugely popular annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which honours the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel Paul Clifford features the immortal and much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’
To parody bad writing successfully takes great skill and I hope that this assignment was as enjoyable to grapple with as it was to judge. The postbag was humming with overwrought prose of inspired awfulness: subject-matter ranged from the spirit-sappingly mundane to the downright repulsive; sentences were convoluted, tautological and cliché-ridden.
Dishonourable mentions to Nicholas Hodgson, Alanna Blake, Brian Murdoch, Michael Swan, R.S. Gwynn, John Phillips, Josh Ekroy, Peter Smalley and Jim Hayes.
The winners below get £25 each. The extra five pounds goes to Bill Greenwell.
If Mandrake Roote had known, all contrarious asseverations aside, that the Thane of Quodd Magna would masticate the left lung of the stripling sacrifice, Tarka Twee, until the poisonous drool ran down his piebald chin, then he (Mandrake) might never have flaunted the regulations so brazenly, nor set in semi-perpetual motion the quest for Ultimate Injustice which I will, from my dung-infested eyrie in The Elm Forest, relate to you, O my eager listeners, with all my phlegm, sparing no scruples, thus to remorselessly document how Mandrake Julius im-Krakat Roote, the offspring of Zeugmana and Flann The Morbid, once the poetaster of KD-57436, reduced the 19 galaxies of RBS Control to a baleful bedlam of savagery and solipsism, and caused an outbreak of auto-mutilation which threatened the very future of Ex-Istence. He failed. Utterly. He impaled himself on Sacrosanct Precipice. But all this will I tell you, with magnificent appendices.
Bill Greenwell
It being Saturday, Daniel had no need of a day-plan, but feeling that he would otherwise fritter the day away, he lay back on the pillow and started to compose one in his head. At the top of the list he put ‘get up’, which was really redundant, but would allow him to cross something off straight away and give him a good start. Next he added ‘shower’ and ‘breakfast’, which gave substance to the list and delayed the difficult part, which soon followed. The next item, in fact, crystallised the problem. If the newspapers had come, it would be ‘read papers’, but if not, it would be ‘feed birds’. He was thus at the mercy of school holidays, weather, teenagers’ habits and much else. He could, he supposed, write it as a fork of two branches, but could see complications later on. He burrowed into the bed and concentrated.
Noel Petty
Was this the calm before the storm? If so, why was my heart palpitating paradoxically? They were keen as mustard to catch me red-handed with my fingers in the fire but I still had an ace up my sleeve. It was time to go back to the drawing board which, in retrospect, I should have done beforehand. I figured Dolores was probably behind what lay ahead of me unless I could get out of what I’d got into. Well I wasn’t born yesterday and tomorrow would prove it provided I could get my act together and not fall apart in the meantime. They say it’s darkest before the dawn and it dawned on me that I had to burn my bridges and get through the eye of a needle if I wasn’t to be stitched up. The chips were down and I knew the score.
Alan Millard
‘Kkg,’ uttered the Man, importing — such was the fecund subtility of the old tongue — both that the water was brackish but drinkable and that an unpropitiated god would soon cast the nether pasture into unwonted shadow. But the Boy drank not, neither did he dash his cup to the ground and deprecate the Bringer of Darkness. For he was unversed in the ways of this speech and heard no more than the sound of a breath caught in the throat. He knew only that here in this narrow, olid cave his quest for enlightenment must begin; and that the Man, hooded in a simple wolfskin sheplar, was charged with guiding his first faltering steps deep into the very core of being. Embraced though he was by the warmth of the fire, still the Boy shivered at the thought. Alerted by the vibration, the Man eased forward on leathery buttocks. ‘Qnp,’ he said.
W.J. Webster
Rodolfo found the night was black. No Stygian striving could make it blacker. Yet it grew blacker. It was more than the blackness seen from inside a tomb, more than the blackness of a pall hidden inside a closed wooden coffin lined with lead, more than the blackness of a pall hidden inside a lead casket inlaid with wood. Yet this blackness was not uniform. Here it aspired to the shade of blackness of the crow’s breast. There it assumed the blackness of the jackdaw’s tail. Elsewhere it strove for the hue of the raven’s wing. Everywhere it struggles for the blackness of the raven’s croak. Everywhere in the piazza blackness vied with blackness. The north colonnade outdid the mourning of Cremona; the south that of Vicenza. The blackness reeked and shrieked of the blackness of oubliette and dungeon. But no blackness was as black as the heart of Rodolfo.
J. Seery
To the village of X in the province of Y in the land of Z came, it is said by some, a man. By others it is said that a woman came, by others still, a dog. So our story takes three directions, each, perhaps, as true as the others, if not truer. The man, those that subscribe to his existence contend, was called El Viro. The woman was called Elvira and the dog, having no owner, was never called at all. To the inn they came, at the same moment of the same day, each in their separate realities. The man ordered a glass of ale from the innkeeper whose hospitable smile is mentioned in only one telling of the tale, creating a further narrative tributary few have chosen to follow as we meticulously shall, as we shall follow all others to their similar but not exactly similar conclusions.
Adrian Fry
No. 2590: Sign of the times
You are invited to submit a poem in praise of some form of asceticism (16 lines maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2590’ by 2 April or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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