My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many tokens, and with the casuistry of both Calvinist and Jesuit, it has been possible for the author of this pretty little Christmas-stocking book to include as bizarre any vehicle he chooses, including motorcycles and the micro-cars that made motoring possible after the defeat of Germany in 1945.
Without these categories, a bus-cum-truck-cum-tractor,variations on the Hummer and the stretched limousine, and too many excursions into the bizarrerie of car names that in other languages have meanings genital and scatalogical, this book would be very thin. Yet even the vehicles that are indisputably cars are padded with examples that hardly count as odd, let alone half-barbaric.The Morris Marina and Austin Allegro were bad and boring rather than bizarre, the Talbot Tagor was too unremarkable to usurp the equivalent Peugeot (the beautifully bizarre Peugeot 601 of 1935 is nowhere mentioned), and the 3-litre version of Austin’s land-crab 1800 was a surprisingly serene, quiet and comfortable competitor for the early Ford Granada and Mrs Thatcher’s favoured Rover.
Jeremy Clarkson and his mates could have cobbled this book together while crashing caravans on Top Gear. It has their wretched command of syntax, their puerile humour and their imagery: to drive a Toyota Crown is as exciting as Christmas spent in a public lavatory in Hartlepool, the Polish Pobeda was as up-to-date as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Russian ZIS sports two-seater did about 100 yards to the gallon and had damp digestive biscuits for brakes, and the ZIL limousine had enough torque to move the Urals.
Keith Ray’s immediate concentration on these ‘Bizarski’ cars suggests that his text may be ordered by nationality, but it is not; nor is it by chronology or alphabet; nor by such automotive obsessions as aerodynamics, front-wheel drive and rear-mounted engines; it has neither an index nor a contents page.
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