Anti-hero

In Competition No. 2417 you were given the opening: ‘He was twenty-three and oh! so agonisingly conscious of the fact. The train came bumpingly to a halt …’ and invited to add 150 or fewer words launching a sensitive and inadequate anti-hero on his fictional adventures. Denis Stone, Huxley’s passenger in Crome Yellow, was the first of a line of maladroit youths whose last mutation was Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon. (I reread both books this year and found that the Huxley held up better.) The genre — what Mr Scogan in Crome Yellow calls ‘a novel about the wearisome development of a young man’s character’ — seems to have died out. Commendations to Noel Petty, Alanna Blake and Alan Millard. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and D.A. Prince has the bonus fiver.

…shaking organic roquette from his ciabatta, and making him drop Caring Mars, the magazine for men wishing to confront their genetic programming.