A preliminary riffle through this novel is not all that encouraging. Three pages of spoof Acknow- ledgments (‘some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends’) range from Graham Swift to Jonathan Swift and from Stevie Wonder to Ralph Vaughan Williams. There is a spoof Preface and a spoof 19-page index of ‘Key Words, Phrases and Concepts’ of absolutely no use even to a reviewer in a hurry. The jacket quotations from reviews of the author’s previous The Truth About Babies are also clearly spoofs (‘A kind of phenomenology of fatherhood’, TLS, ‘It’s cute and it comes with sharp little teeth’, RTE Guide, ‘Just naff’, the Times). Facetiousness is fine at a dinner party, in a pub or in Private Eye. But on this scale in a novel it not merely ceases to amuse but becomes exasperating.
Fortunately, all forebodings of worse to come prove to be baseless once one has dug into the actual text.
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