Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett. For the 1962 club.

I'd never heard of Stephen Prickett before I got this book, but a bit of googling has turned up some information and he seems to have been well thought of in his chosen career in academia, writing many respected works about English literature and religion and romanticism. 

This book however is his one, youthful, punt at fiction and in theory a murder mystery. Spike, the courier of a couple of narrow boats used for holidays on the Shropshire canal, has found a dead body in the dining room. We're told this in retrospect, because the first chapter is Spike's tangled, internal, stream of consciousness as he steers the boats through the locks, deals with someone dropping keys in the river, and wonders when the body will be found. 

The problem is that this style of writing was intended by the modernists to get closer to the way people actually think and make writing less artificial, not more. It doesn't function here for a number of reasons, but mostly because our writer doesn't have the experience or ability to pull it off, and certainly not against genre and while trying to stuff as many literary quotes and allusions into his characters speech as is (un)feasibly possible. 

I feel mean, because he can't have been much past 21 when he wrote the thing, and it's not a terrible first novel - but it is a first novel that should either have had a good trim and suggested rewrite by a competent editor, or been seen as a trial run for a better, tighter book, and slipped quietly in a drawer without publication. 

Also, despite all the lunacy and meandering and the points where it is patently impossible that any group of people would behave as this group of people are behaving (I think Prickett might have been a fan of Edmund Crispin, but without Crispin's talent for maintaining that thin thread of plausibility or the knack of making us care about the characters), the final solution does kind of make sense, the person whose point of view we see the most of does have flashes of something like three-dimensionality, and the shifts between point of view don't jar as much as they could. 

Thanks as ever to Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings for running these clubs every six months. Do check out their blogs for posts linking to other reviews.