Ready for take-off | 23 October 2010

In the recently published Oxford Book of Parodies, John Crace clocks up five entries, thus putting him just behind Craig Brown as our Greatest Living Parodist. Crace may not have quite Brown’s range, but for the last 10 years his ‘Digested Reads’ have been reason enough to buy the Guardian.

Taking a well-known novel, he gives a brief distillation of the plot while capturing — often perfectly — the tone of its author. At the same time, he jabs a sharpened elbow into their pomposities and limitations. It’s been a long time since I ventured anywhere near Arnold Bennett, but to read Crace’s spoof of Anna of the Five Towns — ‘Anna’s heart shuddered with expectant perturbation’ — is to be plunged back into a world where every puff of factory smoke comes with its own basket of verbiage.

Henry Miller may be a parodist’s dream, but Crace’s skewering of Tropic of Cancer is a thing to stand in awe of:

I am an Artist. I do not even have a sou for the cunt of a woman so I go to the Jardin des Tulieries and impale my cock on a nude statue. I then siphon some gasoline from a Citroen to get drunk before spunking into the petrol tank.

John Fowles too presents a plumply inviting target for anyone in possession of a pitchfork. Crace, though, wields it like a rapier in his demolition of The French Lieutenant’s Woman — especially when it comes to puncturing Fowles’s infuriating knowingness and reminders of his own erudition:

We could also spend many pages discussing Victorian society from a modern perspective, with recourse to such imagery as computers, but first I would like to talk again of me. It’s tough being a novelist in the 1960s, unsure if your characters exist and wanting to pretend you aren’t really controlling their story.