A plague on all P-words

This isn’t a book to read before lights out. It’s about a mentally ill man whose mother exiles him from rural Ireland after years of rumours and reprisals related to his habit of startling passers-by with his bared erection. She has tried strapping him to a chair and bolting the door, but all that did was give him a fetish for not emptying his bladder. Now Martin John is flat-sitting in south London, working as a nightwatchman and hoarding old Eurovision tapes and lists of words beginning with P. But menacing this toehold on equilibrium is the arrival of an ill-disposed male lodger, who swiftly becomes the object of his paranoia.

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Martin John’s fevered brain (it’s always ‘Martin John’) gives the novel its jagged rhythm. Often we can’t make sense of what we’re reading — why does he keep mentioning Beirut and asking people to ‘check his card’? — but these and other refrains crystallise with revelations of past crimes.