This picture shows the mezzotintist Rex Tint, as a child, painting a portrait of his sister Dot Tint, chronicler of vampiric sea shanties and much else besides. Rex had great pretensions, in his curdled youth, to becoming a painter of note, rather than a mezzotintist, and he executed innumerable daubs, of which the portrait of Dot is but one. Several art critics have tugged at their beards and fiddled with their hornrimmed spectacles as they struggle to understand why Rex Tint abandoned paint and set out on the path to mezzotinty glory. Now the tale can be told. Well, not “can be” but “has been”, in Pebblehead’s latest bestselling paperback How The Secret Police Confiscated Rex Tint’s Paintbox And How He Sobbed And Whimpered Until A Kindly Butcher’s Shop Assistant Gave Him A Secondhand Mezzotinting Kit. Annoyingly, the prize-winning paperbackist does not tell us the reason why the secret police targeted the tiny painter. Had he perhaps daubed a less than flattering portrait of Prince Fulgencio? Or, on one of his plein air excursions, had he unwittingly painted a top secret experimental brain-incapacitating nerve gas facility? It really would help if Pebblehead could do some proper research for a change, but I expect he is too busy bashing out his next bestseller on that antique typewriter of his, looking up occasionally at the picture of Anthony Burgess drawingpinned to his cork board and pretending it is a mirror.

 

Bobsleigh and curling were the great enthusiasms of the winter sports enthusiast. His enthusiasm was that of a spectator rather than a participant, his body being too gangly and chaotic for him to accomplish even the simplest athletic technique with any measure of success. As a youth, he had fancied himself as the sort of person who could throw himself off a high diving board and perform breathtaking pirouettes before plunging, straight as an arrow, into the municipal swimming pool, but his efforts were laughable. After dozens of attempts, he saw sense, slinking away from the pool and indeed away from the town, heading north until he reached snow and ice, where he felt at home, and where winter sports were engaged in all year round, and he became a fan of bobsleigh and curling, and he bought a pair of sunglasses and a season ticket to events.

It was in a stadium watching a curling quarter-final that the enthusiast met the dimwit. The dimwit was an important figure in this cold country, having risen, as so many dimwits do, to civic office. He had his own box in the stadium, as he had boxes in all the stadia thereabouts, for though he knew nothing of the rules and drama of curling or of any other sport, winter or otherwise, the dimwit liked to be seen out and about, being important, a golden chain of office slung around his neck, and a cap upon his head.

The enthusiast and the dimwit bumped into each other as they both made for the automated snack dispenser in the lobby of the stadium. The enthusiast recognised the dimwit, for the latter’s photograph was regularly published in newspapers and magazines and propaganda sheets, and he often appeared on television, against a backdrop of ice-girt palaces and official buildings.

“Gosh!” said the winter sports enthusiast, “You are Bogdan Vingo, the minister of broad sweeping policy pronouncements!”

“I am indeed, little gangly chaotic person,” replied the dimwit, buffing his chain with the cuff of his coat.

And so began a surprising friendship that was to last as long as they both lived, for the winter sports enthusiast and the dimwit discovered they had much in common, not least that, in a certain light, they could be taken for twins. They were not twins, of course, but the resemblance was close enough to disconcert the visually impaired citizens of that freezing land, and both used it to their advantage, in advancing their separate schemes and plots.

If you were to chance upon your Doppelgänger, you might wish it wasn’t a dimwit, but needs must when the devil drives. And the devil did drive the winter sports enthusiast, for as he realised the opportunities for mischief and shenanigans afforded by his striking likeness to the dimwit, he dug himself ever deeper into a pit of moral turpitude, and by the time he was racked by remorse and wished to clamber out of it, it was far too late.

Source : The Dimwit Doppelgänger & Other Cautionary Anecdotes From The Freezing Cold Country In The North by Pebblehead.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy The Roads To Freedom has fallen out of fashion somewhat – as if that mattered – yet it remains a classic. But for a book with a bit more existentialist heft, I recommend Pebblehead’s bestselling paperback The Roads To Jaywick. That blighted, benighted, dilapidated seaside town, has of course, provided fodder for any number of potboilers, including Jaywick – West Of Clacton and The Sordid Sands Of Squalor, but Pebblehead’s is a fundamentally serious work, and there is a lot about cows in it, which is always a good thing.

In an interview with The Literary Dunderpate, the author explained the genesis of his novel. “One morning as I was eating marmalade straight from the jar with a spoon,” he said, “It occurred to me, in a flash of insight, that, if one is so minded, all roads lead eventually to Jaywick. Once you approach the shabby resort itself there is but the one road, pitted and unlovely and dismal, but to reach that road one must travel along many other roads, depending on where you start from. You might be in Gore Pit or Fingringhoe or Vange, or even in Messing or Fobbing or Dengie: it doesn’t much matter, for there will be a road wherever you are that will lead you inexorably to the windswept collapsing hovels of Jaywick. Lord knows, even from Mambeg and Clynder, if you have Jaywick in your soul you will find a road to take you there.”

That last phrase is telling. Pebblehead originally planned to call his titanic masterpiece A Jaywick Of The Soul, but decided against it. “It is true enough,” he explained, “that there is a sort of psychoJaywick that lurks within the mind of every man and woman on the planet, but I wanted to insist upon the real, physical Jaywick, that place where the sickened traveller can come to a halt and go for a pint in the Never Say Die and get their head kicked in by feral Jaywick youths.” Pebblehead goes on to describe the transfixing sense of Weltschmerz he felt when peering over the sea wall and seeing, on the gruesome beach, a big sign warning him of “Danger – Keep Off”.

As a bestselling paperbackist, Pebblehead has sometimes been criticised for being shackled to realism, and in the process of writing The Roads To Jaywick he did indeed  test out his thesis by travelling by road to those glum coastal shacks from a variety of starting points. He proved that roads from Threekingham and Scratby and Snodland, from Coffinswell and Mugdock and Crundale, from Hoo and Swillington and Catbrain and Widdop and Slack and Splat, from each of these, in a cart pulled by inelegant horses, he could, eventually, reach Jaywick. And that, he suggests, is what makes us human, arguing his case with a vivid account – taking up more than two-thirds of the book – of the famous incident known in Jaywick lore as The Day The Cows Came Visiting. The cows, of course, came not by road but, being cows, across fields, across flat hopeless fields on a misty morning. It is a haunting tale, and one to which Pebblehead’s gorgeous prose does justice.

I believe it is a great scandal that The Roads To Jaywick is not a set text to be read by tinies in all the community education hubs in the land. It is all very well filling their heads with the likes of Sartre and De Beauvoir and Norman Spinrad, but those who devise the curriculum will reap a whirlwind. Better by far, surely, to envision a nation in which our urchins sit enraptured in their study pods, lapping up the timeless words of Pebblehead? Pebblehead who, for the sake of literature, lay drunkenly sprawled in the gutter outside the Never Say Die in a wretched seaside hellhole in the spooky mist, at risk of being trampled by roaming cows whose roaming brought them, as if by some uncanny cow-controlling propulsive force, across the fields to Jaywick, west of Clacton.

Fritz : His Hinge And His Pips is the terrific new bestseller from Pebblehead. This time, the paperbackist gives us a thriller and, gosh, it certainly makes for an exciting read. The beginning of the book, though, is deceptively slow-moving, even dull. We learn that the eponymous hero is an emotional cripple who wallows in a stew of malignant Weltschmerz. He is an unattractive character, wearing unattractive clothing, giving off an unattractive pong, and living in an unattractive chalet in an unattractive seaside resort. We do not warm to him as we learn, in chapters one and two, of his grumbling and his scruffy dog and the bits of celery and spring onion forever stuck in his beard. We are repelled by his grimy bathtub and his many stains.

But then, in chapter three, Pebblehead pulls the rabbit out of the hat and we are off on a pell-mell rollercoaster ride of thrills and spills aplenty. What happens is that Fritz decides one morning to eat a piece of fruit. It is a pip-riddled fruit, and Fritz spits out the pips with such force that they lodge in the hinge of his door. The door is ajar at the time, because Fritz’s scruffy dog has lolloped into the chalet garden to piss on a briar patch. When the dog comes back in, Fritz goes to close the door, but cannot. It turns out that the pips Fritz spat across the room are of adamantine hardness, and, lodged in the hinge, prevent the door from shutting.

Thus begins a sequence of events that propels Fritz and his scruffy dog through a series of adventures that begins in an ironmonger’s shop and rapidly moves on to a coathanger factory, a sausage maker’s, the undersea headquarters of a madcap swordfish person, and a barn full of cows. All the while, the pips remain stuck in the hinge and the chalet door stays maddeningly ajar. Yet as the story progresses, Fritz’s Weltschmerz becomes less malignant and his dog less scruffy. By chapter forty-nine, when we find Fritz picking bits of celery and spring onion out of his beard and disposing of them down a hygenic chute, we are ready to forgive the griminess of his bathtub.

It must be said that the novel is not an unalloyed success. I could have done without the excessive use of exclamation marks, for example, and Pebblehead’s pip descriptions are deplorable. I suspect he may have copied them out of a cheap botanical gazetteer without first checking its accuracy. He has committed similar sins in the past, notably in the Wet Behind The Ears trilogy, vast chunks of which were plagiarised from a mistranslated Serbian birdseed catalogue.

These minor cavils aside, Fritz : His Hinge And His Pips is a tremendous addition to the Pebblehead canon. Read it with your feet up, on your balcony, if you have a balcony, with a bag of snacks at your side, the constant tweeting of chaffinches assailing your ears, freshly laundered socks on the washing line, sprites in the wainscot, and butchers’ drapes billowing in the balmy spring breeze.

There is much in the news these days about the credit crunch, but this should not lead us to neglect many other important crunches. I sometimes worry that less attention is paid to some crunches because they lack the alliterative quality of the credit crunch, which of course makes it a favourite of headline writers and broadcasters. Actually, it’s not quite true that I “sometimes” worry about this. If truth be told, my fretfulness about neglected crunches is starting to consume my every waking thought. Yesterday, for example, I was standing upon a bridge, staring off into the distance, buffeted by a gale, and all I could think of was the fact that the credit crunch is pushing some of my preferred crunches off the front pages. I don’t have any useful media connections – or, to be more precise, my people don’t have any connections with their people – so it’s not as if I can just send a few metal tapping machine messages to selected newspaper crunch reporters and put pressure on them to cover other crunches. Would that I could! What I did instead, yesterday, was to trudge disconsolately home and to spend a fruitful few hours studying Pebblehead’s bestselling paperback The Bumper Book Of Crunches. I can recommend this fantastic, and very fat, book to anyone who seeks to broaden their knowledge beyond the credit crunch. It is packed with crunch-related facts, anecdotage, illustrations, diagrams, and even its very own cleverly-crafted crunchiness.

Kloppstock’s Jugband Crumpled Baize Tarboosh, the latest bestselling paperback by Pebblehead, is a wonderful evocation of those much lamented Sappensopp Days. “Tipping, tapping, flimflam… goose grease and lavender and a tin of polish for the porch… the light in the tunnels and the flap of the flaps in the flappery out by the byre… those endless bowls of piping hot porridge… such were the joys of the Sappensopp Days”, he writes, and if, like me, you are an unreconstructed Sappensoppist, it all comes flooding back.

There was an earlier book, of course, by Inspip, and I stand by my review when it first came out in hardback, where I wrote “This book is shoddy and inadequate and inadequate! It is thoroughly inadequate!” Inspip had the temerity to write what he called A Thorough And Adequate Account Of Those Sappensopp Days, despite being a secret Soppensappist. When I revealed this gruesome truth Inspip was discredited and his bones were thrown off a cliff into the churning ocean. Good riddance to him, say I.

Pebblehead, by contrast, has the measure of those Sappensopp Days. It seems he has listened to contemporary tape recordings of claimants and wardens and tosspots, and although his tone is often desperate, when it is not twittering, he nails it. By “it” I mean a very concrete sense of urbane jugband merriment. And the names you would expect are all here, though I cannot repeat any of them for legal reasons. I don’t want my bones to follow Inspip’s off that gaunt and mighty cliff.

The point about Pebblehead’s prose in his examination of Sappensoppism is that he chugs along, chug chug chug, in a way that is attractive to those who like their prose to have that kind of locomotive trundling rhythm. Pale poets may skip and prance, and paler poets may gambol ‘cross verdant sward, but generally such pale poetasters have a whiff of the Soppensapp about them. I do not make the charge lightly. I would say the same were I standing on the beach, at dusk, surrounded by gulls scavenging among the bleached bones of Inspip. There are worse ways to end one’s day. I have loafed and been bitter, sometimes, when recalling those Sappensopp Days, the gleaming lanterns, the flint hearts, the barbicans atop the tors. Some come to genuflect and some come to keen, and those are their ways, and I shall not gainsay them, or, if I do, I shall crunch across their own gravel, on my hands and knees, to prove my point. You will not hear such claims from the Inspips of this world, this spinning globe, this dispensation.

Inspip was at Innsmouth when his horrible book came out, and he was betrayed by a clairvoyant. That is often how these things turn out, how tangled skeins unravel. The clairvoyant was unbridled, certainly, and mouthy, but that made a welcome change. Guttural imprecations and gargling were her mode of speech, if speech it can be called, and as soon as he heard what was being said about him the wretched Inspip tried to flee. Typical, I may say, of those who observe the Soppensappist debaucheries, for debaucheries they are. His fleeing, or rather his failed fleeing, took him to places human beings ought better avoid, such as the wild hills and the fiercest sea fronts, the most dismal of outcrops and the tinniest of fairground arcades. Tinny it was and tacky and awash with tat, and there Inspip was cornered, there he was revealed as a pooper whose cronies vanished, pfft!, gone, leaving him alone in his poopery. He knew his book was but page after page of meretricious squamoogle, yet he pressed on, writing hundreds and hundreds of pages, like a Blunkett. I have said elsewhere that he never knew the first thing about the Sappensopp Days, not because attempts had not been made, in his childhood, to bash a few basic ideas into his curly-haired head, but because he wilfully let all that he did once know evaporate, like a type of milk in a tin. It is a mystery why he did so, why he allowed the Soppensappists to squish their boggling into him. He was packed so tight with it he might have burst.

The service Pebblehead does in his new book is fourfold, I think. He surprises us with little glimpses of his chugging. He is aware that his readers know more than he does about cows and birds and Stalinism and cashew nuts, for example, and he does not try to overreach himself. (He does overreach himself on the mad clanging of bells in mad bell-towers in a mad country, but he does so persuasively, and in spades.) Then there is his almost grating acknowledgement of those who allowed him to listen to the tape recordings. I confess I fought back tears, and the ducts still shed the odd drop now and then as I recollect how fantastic an achievement it was to risk his bones in circumstances where you or I would have hidden behind a nest of crates, panting, heart hammering thump-a-thump-a-thump-a-thump. And fourthly, critically, he knows his bales, and he says so, without apology, without rancour, without coming over all twee and mimsy, like an Inspip would have done, had he known a bale from a pile of pins and pencils or some other Soppensappist vulgarity.

What we are left with is something we can all be proud of, standing on a bridge, in blistering sunlight, watching the sparkling river below us flowing relentlessly to a destination we can never even imagine reaching, even if night crashes down around our ears a thousand times, a thousand thousand times, in this land it would be bonkers to disavow. It is on that bridge I stand. I do not think Pebblehead would recognise me now, and I know for certain that Inspip, if by some miracle his bones leapt up out of the deep and snapped themselves together into human form, and were enfleshed, and quick with life, even then Inspip would know me not, for I have read the book, and it is as if I were truly there, fluttering and bright, pitched past pitch of grandeur in those jugband Sappensopp Days.

Before plunging into the ocean, snorkelled and flippered or, as it may be, encased in full body diving gear, it is critically important that you are aware of the actual size of the innumerable life forms that teem within the vasty deep. If you have read Pebblehead’s bestselling paperback The Neurasthenic Aquaperson, you will appreciate the force of my argument. In this book, the author ploughs through a relentless litany of aquatic diving enthusiasts of a nervous disposition who came a-cropper in the water because they feared an encounter with some monstrous sea-being whose picture they had pored over in an album of marine life, without having taken care to read a parenthetical addendum to the caption saying (actual size) or (not to scale).

For the hearty and the reckless, of course, there is no problem. They will topple off the side of their boat and go happily splashing about in the depths with the same gusto they would take to striding across a wild and desolate moor, or tucking into breakfast in a magnificent hotel dining room. But woe betide the mentally fragile diving person, one who suffers from attacks of the vapours, should they jump into the broiling ocean unprepared!

Let us consider an example. Here is a picture of Zoanthus socialis:

In reality, this is a tiny thing, much magnified in our reproduction, and threatens no peril to the average-sized human diver, whether hearty or neurasthenic. Yet the latter, those whose brains are given to fuming imaginings based upon anatomical inaccuracy, may have understood these wee creatures to be titanic in size. They may fear being sucked into Zoanthus socialis’ hideous maw, helpless and alone. Such timidity in the sea is desperately bad for the moral fibre.

Pebblehead acknowledges that many nerve-wracked oceanic explorers will prepare themselves by swallowing a draught of some brain tonic or emboldening potion before clambering into their wetsuit. He condemns this practice, rightly in my view, in prose of towering vigour. “There can be no substitute,” he writes, “for preceding each dive into the squalid black depths of the oceans with untold hours of study of the actual size of thousands, nay, millions of grotesque life forms that populate those very same squalid black depths into which the neurasthenic aquaperson is due to plunge!”

Some cynics have pointed out that Pebblehead has a vested interest. He owns the rights to a patented mechanism by which the prospective diving person is able to stand before a full-length mirror and watch as, one after another, actual size images of numberless sea-beings are superimposed upon his or her body. An accompanying set of tomes contains colour plates of each creature, fully captioned in English and Latin, which can be consulted during the slide show, or separately. This seems to me to be a wholly admirable enterprise, and it is no skin off my nose if it earns Pebblehead a fortune. Indeed, one might ask what comparable service to humanity, neurasthenic or otherwise, is being provided by other bestselling paperback authors. Perhaps I am being unfair to the likes of Andy McNab, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Martin Amis, but where oh where are their initiatives to give succour and hope to jangle-brained aquapersons, pig farmers, posties, stamp collectors, bellringers, detectives, pie shop proprietors, and conquistadors? Pebblehead deserves a medal, or at least a tin cup, and I for one will happily campaign on his behalf. I shall be outside the town hall with a placard and a flask of tea at six o clock tomorrow morning, and every morning. Join me.