Social bliss rightly criticised for being crap. Distressed by irregular sexual congress. Pissed on happiness and foaming ale. Half-blind. You learnt English grammar one-eyed through a peephole. RAT ATTACKS on sleeping infants and random capitals plague your dreams. They always go for the eyes: bloodthirsty Stalinists suck the macula like Rasputin would. A really nice chap until chapter five when he kills the other act: a psychopathic ventriloquist. A profound meditation on responsibility. A murder. He ACCUSES the dummy. The dummy wouldn't be so stupid as to admit to guilt, a fucking useless emotion for a sociopath.

"Do my lips move when I am Uncle Eric?" asks George.

The children laugh nervously. There are on the hostile mountainside BLEAK skies that are kinder than humans. In nature the monster is understood. In Hollywood he is let loose. Everything is concealable, for a while. The wicked are turned good by contract, bad by contact with the celebrated, and lazy by routine. The imprint of his fingers on her neck persists. His domestic tyranny transformed into art for profit from pain. He is said to have been benevolent. Misery made him a fiend. Victimhood, the Joker in the pack. You cannot undo what you have done, but you can pay back what you owe if you sell pictures of the abuse to mug punters with wallets for brains and a bloodlust for instant gratification and acceptance.

I am not your mother. I do not give absolution. I am not your mentor, your conscience, your third eye. But deep down you have always known that really YOU are the problem here. You are to blame. You are the second person, how can it be otherwise? It is inescapable.

You cannot unlearn what you have discovered: the North West Passage is BLOCKED in a tide of catastrophe and millenarianism. The curse of awareness. The djenni does not go back in the lamp. The rebellion can only be extinguished.

Dangerously unexpected and conversationally fluid, George as Eric takes a paragraphed break, picks up the baggy narrative thread and gives it a yank.
Eisenhower. He coughs and eventually, speaks:

"Sheets soaked in sweat again… Hung them over the bannister."

"God in Heaven, Eric. Your skin colour!"

Victor is a hopeless racist; he thinks he is appropriately colonial and polite. Eric has a consumptive hack that gets worse by the hours. His wives' medicine is difficult to swallow. As always with Eileen, Sonia or Alice, everything has an extra layer of pink fluff and marshmallow.

Friends' failures feed little re-fills of complicity and coherence that he finds astonishing as a fictional entity from ETON with dodgy sexual politics and seedy eyes. His other half is voiced by an actress who insists on the feminine noun, just as her sisters in Catalonia always do, in case he tries anything on with her.

"Man is no longer Head of State. There is no divine right to rule the roost!" she cries, pepper spray at the ready.

Sonia, Eileen, Sylvia wish to strike down the PATRIARCHY without any subtext. The road to being emancipated is more long winded than anticipated. Damned, and double damned, once by piety, twice by her own sex, she trails off at the end of her sentence: marriage to a selfish prick, normal; wed to his own ego, naturally; so promiscuous, bit of a surprise. This isn't the late 60s after all. This is 1984 we're talking about. Eileen sometimes gets confused. Sonia less so.

Mrs O sees the writing on the mural for the voyeurs from the Big Brotherhood. Who is watching whom? GCHQ. Male gaze. State surveys citizens. Faces are booked, scrutinised, captured. Life is organised according to Clock Time: the beginning (capital), the middle (England), the end (of history.)

LESBIANS in hard hats and boots sit on walls and eat vegan sandwiches prepared by totalitarian technocrats from the BBC canteen with lashings of ginger beer and irony. Public school boys spit into their teacups whenever the workers are spoken of.

"I do love you, Eric, George or whoever you are", BLURTS out Sonia, Eileen, or Sylvia's mother, he really can't remember.

To relieve apocalyptic tension Eric speaks out:

"You have a MAGNIFICENT vagina for a woman. Can I touch it?"

 - Yes.

"Can you show me where it is?"

One day you wake up in Tunbridge Wells and demand cocaine. You do a gig in a public lavatory recently converted to performance art. "I've played in some toilets in my time, " is irresistible. You're shit, but you're in the right place. You are a lucky bastard. You lead a charmed life as a post-modern magic philologist.

Eric feels wretched. His wife dies. He dies. George survives, thank God. And now a lifetime later, he is still coughing up blood. The weather in Jura is miserable. The copyright is released. He finishes the book before the end of the world. Just.