Master of the merry-go-round

Sprawling, teeming with people and flooded with an almost malevolent brilliance, this book is the literary equivalent of some vast conurbation. As with a conurbation, it is difficult to identify the heart – and heart here means not merely centre but humanity. Trapped, as in one of Mark Gertler’s most famous pictures, on a constantly accelerating roundabout, the characters all seem to be in imminent danger of being hurled into oblivion by the centrifugal force of a powerfully churning imagination.

Two of the most important of these characters are a father and son. Digby, once the heir to a company that rivalled Wedgwood in the manufacture of pottery, is now an antique crock among the antique crockery that still remains to him as a reminder of past affluence. Unwise investments will soon see even his present modest means dwindle to almost nothing. Theo, in his forties and a brilliant trumpeter in an unsuccessful jazz band, sponges off his father while unjustly suspecting him of having murdered his mother.

Another important character is Digby’s neighbour Daisy, a film star as famous in the Sixties for her glamour and talent as Julie Christie or Susannah York ever was. She, like Digby, also has problems with a son. Sired by a famous photographer whom she has divorced, Howard, evasive and erratic, is involved in the international anarchist movement, with an influential website with the address (an echo from the Dunciad) Thyhandgreatanarch.com.

Throughout the narrative, the lives of these four characters keep getting lost from sight, as though hurrying passers-by in some crowded street were intermittently obstructing one’s vision. As a boy growing up in the family mansion near Stoke-on-Trent, Digby has been taken by a flamboyantly eccentric uncle into his father’s Wunderkammer. This room of wonders, containing ‘a haphazard gallimaufry’ of valuable antiquities, ‘endearingly ugly debris from the Industrial Revolution’, ‘freakish objects collected from beaches’ and so forth, can be seen as a metaphor for the novel itself.