Competition | 4 December 2010

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition

In Competition No. 2675 you were invited to submit a book-jacket blurb for a well-known work of fiction that is designed to be as off-putting as possible. You were on sparkling form all round this week, especially Marion Shore, Robert Schechter and John O’Byrne. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and in a photo finish the bonus fiver goes to Chris O’Carroll by a nose.

At last, a book that children and adults alike can turn to for a comprehensive analysis of the sexual mores and socio-economic paradigms that defined England in the 1930s. Mary Poppins is a stern young spinster employed by the Banks family (a name that alerts the reader to author P.L. Travers’s subversive critique of the capitalist caste system) in the constricting, traditionally female field of childcare.  A romantically yearning but erotically repressed member of the downtrodden servant class, Poppins fights back with the help of her dangerous imagination, drawing the Banks children into a series of fantasy scenarios that leave her young charges simultaneously exhilarated and disorientated. Her ambiguous relationship with a chimney sweep — that most Freudian of professions, in which a man dirties himself by penetrating tight domestic spaces — adds transgressive spice to this challenging allegorical adventure.
Chris O’Carroll

Here is a novel that courageously confronts and challenges one of the most entrenched taboos of  modern Western society: that of the ‘age difference’ between a couple who share their lives. Until now the passion of a middle-aged man for a 12-year-old girl has been censured as a morally repellent perversion — truly ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. In Lolita, however, it is presented as natural and wholesome, whatever stratagems become necessary to escape the narrow disapproval of the ‘respectable’.