Richard Asplin: Gagged

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN

Set in the coke-smeared milieu of the US television networks, Gagged is a rapid ride through a twisted, paranoid plot peopled with characters so outrageous and extreme that they're probably based on real-life figures.

Gagged focuses on Don Silver, a big wheel at his family's Mercury Studios,
a network that is rapidly running out of both hits and money, so their very
dubious financiers are rapidly running out of patience.

Don — who's been behind so many bad pilots they nickname him Buddy Holly — heads to the UK in the company's
private jet and, while spending half a
million a week on hookers, cocaine and hotels, attempts to find himself a comedy writer to pull the studios, and him, out of the proverbial.

He turns up Sheridan and Ben, sad London comedy drop-outs who, through twists too tight to describe here, end up with a hit on their hands, in more ways then one. And then things start to get really messy.

Despite the novel being subtitled
"a thriller with jokes", it actually works the other way around. The plot is clever and far-reaching, but mostly it serves as a
malleable frame upon which Asplin can hang every gag he's ever written which, as a former/failed stand-up comedian himself, is quite a few.

His descriptions of people are unique, bizarre yet vividly real, and the pitting of the dreary London lads against the LA
TV lifestyle works a treat.

Don, we discover, likes "to talk loudly and boorishly to preposterously breasted women for too long about stuff he didn't know about, take all his coke at once, remove his pants, and fall over". An increasingly loose cannon, Don bounces through Gagged like a pinball in a brightly coloured machine, making promises, doing deals, denying the authenticity
of lurid photographs involving himself and dead comedians, and bedding
waif-like creatures that he introduces as his "nieces".

Yip, it's all here, and it's all good. Occasionally there are so many gags that it can all be a little overwhelming but, mostly, it's genius. Ace.

* Random House, $26.95