'So, what's your idea of fun then, Ian?' is the glorious dinner-party question which opens this entertaining and compelling novel. As another guest shares a more conventional answer with the room, Ian confides in the reader his own graphic and disturbingly violent idea of fun. The narrator is an intelligent yet self-depreciating middle aged man, whose wife is pregnant with their first child. He truly loves his wife and feels he ought to share 'this evil stuff' with her before the birth, but believes that it will tear her apart.

Ian instead relates his life to the reader, beginning with his eidesis - defined here as the ability to recreate visual images with extreme accuracy and detail. Such photographic memory may be experienced by autistics and idiot savants, but Ian describes himself as 'an eidetiker who could communicate normally'. Ian's heightened observational and visual-recall skills have evidently not affected his remarkable diction, but it becomes apparent that his emotional capacity is limited; although, crucially, not altogether absent.

His childhood was defined by his father's absence and one particular resident of his mother's time-encapsulated caravan park - where he is befriended by a seaside retiree who takes an interest in his eidesis and ultimately his upbringing. Mr Broadhurst or - as he prefers to be addressed - 'The Fat Controller' demonstrates and develops Ian's eidetic potential with startling and sinister results.

Ian goes on to share his subsequent university years and the second of his life's determinants, Dr Gyggle. Dr Gyggle proposes that Ian is a borderline personality with pronounced schizoid tendencies, and suffers from a complex delusion. In turn, the novel plays with The Fat Controller's possible identity, then with the probability of his existence, and finally with Ian's very perception of reality. An entertaining literary quirk shifts the story from being told in the first person to the third person, which further encourages mistrust in the narrator's reliability.

Dr Gyggle does not believe Ian is psychotic, but can we even believe in Dr Gyggle? Is Ian mad, bad, both or neither? With perception reduced to being this subjective, so too is morality. In a world where Ian's 'evil' can elicit sympathy and empathy, the novel invites a re-analysis of ethics. Ian's eidesis is perhaps a metaphor for modern life - bombarded by graphic visual imagery yet drained of an emotional response to it; lacking the framework to understand or form an 'appropriate' reaction.

My Idea of Fun is packed with cynical rancour about modern life. Set against Ian's coastal gypsy-like upbringing, modernity is subjected to rigorous intellectual analysis and a fair dose of derision. This is a brutal world; life an 'Intrinsically empty and mechanical experience'; yet the novel's misanthropy plays up against wonderfully astute and witty observations - from edible financial products to God the Cinematographer.

Diction is elaborate and at points extravagant: occasionally the author can be seen behind the narrator, writing around the desire to use a certain word, or explore an incidental thought. But with these few exceptions the prose is natural despite its complexity, the sumptuousness of the vocabulary a delight, and the challenge of comprehension worth the effort. Overall, it's a great read. Or, as The Fat Controller might have said 'An agreeably diverting publication from a most incisive intellect, as exceedingly jocular as it is expressively misanthropic'.

END

(c) Ben Davies 2009

reviewed Wednesday 3 June 09 / London