For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on. Unlike some of the more Derridean elements at the NME, his reviews of new bands and LPs were both comprehensible and authentically funny. He has gone on to become a successful comedy broadcaster and writer for radio, TV and film: The Day Today, The Thick of It, Harry Hill’s TV Burp. Recently he was part of the team that won an Emmy for the US political comedy series Veep.
The Mule is Quantick’s second novel (his first, Sparks, came out in 2012). It is narrated by an eccentric and somewhat literal translator of European fiction called Jacky, nicknamed ‘the Mule’ by unkind college contemporaries — ‘I abandoned my lunch and went over to the mirror. I studied my face for several minutes. Maybe the large eyes were like those of a mule? I couldn’t see it myself.’
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