Humour

Chaplin & Company is an alarming proposition for anyone with a low threshold for the cute and quirky. Its main character, Odeline Milk, is a mime artist. She is serious and eccentric. In bed she lies on her back ‘as if she has been arranged this way and told not to move’. She wears brogues several sizes too big for her feet. When we meet her, she is moving into a canal boat in London. Her mother, with whom she lived in Arundel, West Sussex, has just died. Odeline does not dwell on this. Instead she is thinking about her new life. In London, she thinks, her artistic endeavours will

‘To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would’ writes the alien narrator of Matt Haig’s novel The Humans. Professor Andrew Martin is not Professor Andrew Martin at all, but rather a Vonnedorian sent to destroy all evidence on Earth that Martin has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. This mathematical breakthrough, think the Vonnedorians, would lead to technological advances not safe in the hands of the violent and primitive humans. They must be stopped. Martin is murdered and his laptop destroyed. His wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver, must also be killed; but perhaps a little predictably, what happens

Fobbit, by David Abrams, is an attempt at describing a wartime tour from different perspectives, including soldiers and support personnel. Chapter by chapter our viewpoint rotates within this cast of characters.  Indeed, for every three infantrymen, five soldiers are required in forward deployed locations to cook, care for wounded, file paperwork, et cetera. Abrams himself performed such a support role as a public affairs officer deployed to Baghdad in 2005. Spending most of his time on Forward Operating Bases or FOBs, Abrams was one of many Fobbits, a kind of GWOT technocrat, fighting the war from behind a desk. Two characters feature in the narrative, the Fobbit Staff Sergeant Chance

Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored wives in French villages. Here we have a thriller, but one written by two eminent contemporary poets in which poets are murdered in correspondent ways to their work. A man who wrote a collection called Stray gets torn apart by dogs. A womaniser who writes about oceans gets lured to his watery death by a beautiful woman. Is the murderer jealous of these poets’ reputations? or is somebody trying to create much needed publicity for the art? Luckily, there