BRITISH STORY

A British academic finds his theory on fictional characters intersecting with the narratives of several eccentrics.

Kennedy is a literature professor who worries a lot: about problems with his Falstaff project, his wife’s desire to conceive, a student’s plagiarism that’s linked to a dalliance he fears will surface, and his theory that literary characters are as real as nonfictional humans. Then he meets Arthur Mountain, a Falstaffian Welshman who sounds like a fictional character: the strident nationalist Citizen in Joyce’s Ulysses. Arthur, who has his own project involving mysterious “stoplines,” brings adventure to Kennedy’s life, breaking his routines with excursions, a picnic and a long story by his wife, Natalie. It tells of a simple man who attends a soccer match and gets caught up in awful violence with “the worst man there is.” Kennedy listens, “as absorbed as a boy at the end of day in the appetising mellowness of chalk.” Things get more than a little meta when characters in the inner tale turn out to be real and everyone seems to be connected—as one might expect in a Dickensian novel, certainly one more conventional than this. Nath (English/Univ. of Westminster; La Rochelle, 2010), includes nods to Shakespeare and Joyce and Tristram Shandy, references enough playing with modernism and literary style to offer an unorthodox survey course with this as the one required text—maybe held in classrooms suffused with the “mellowness of chalk.”

Sure, it’s a bit self-indulgent and probably too quirky to keep a lazy reader from quitting early, yet the novel has a gem of a minithriller in Natalie’s tale and an overall brain-tickling web of delights and surprises.