KEY POINTS:
Penniless, jobless, directionless, feckless young Alan Allen (hold the jokes) has just been told that Edinburgh University can get along fine without him. So he's happy to be offered a vatful of money by a man who owns much of Lothian, if he'll just go and collect an egg. Yes, an egg. An antique, painted egg.
Alan sets off across Europe on a road trip that in content and style is often impure Kerouac. With him go a baseball bat-wielding poetry devotee called Mike, a dental/mental nurse called Deirdre and, for a while, an Aids sufferer who sits in rivers.
First published in the mid-1990s, the anarchic narrative ricochets around a continent of ethnic cleansing and urban violence. It's jammed with black comedy, grey squalor, and psychedelic surrealism. A woman burns a toy theatre in front of Alan to show how her family needs re-housing. A visiting writer and his host discuss deer-stalking over 840 glasses of sherry. An asthma sufferer strangles himself in a corridor. And that's just the first six pages. This is not so much a read as a sustained spell of road rage.
Everyone talks as if out of their head and their tree. You can't - nor would you want to - connect with any of the characters; they seldom connect with themselves. The Rhine ... Salerno ... Glasgow: locations are detailed, yet dreamlike. Nightmare-like, more often. Ravioli is served with cement. A Scottish local councillor appears, disappears, reappears.
So does confused and calamitous sex. There's Paradise Lost in a garden, a shotgun in a pensione, a climactic scene of murder, arson, looting and a decomposing serpent. And there's an ending which is a series of cop-outs.
Dialogue and structure are indefatigably anarchic. The narrative seldom drops below a frenzied hurtle. When it does, you sense an emotional and stylistic sogginess beneath. But it's a startling, singular book. If it shut up occasionally and was about 25 per cent shorter, it would be a satisfying, successful one as well.
Drivetime
By James Meek (Canongate $27)
* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
