Folk coming to this work having previously read a selection of the author's numerous published texts will have been no doubt expecting the terse light hearted yet sardonic writings much aped throughout the industry that has become the signature if not of a generation then at least one as influential to the beginning of this century as the Dada movement was at the beginning of the last.
Instead they will have been struck by both the verbosity of its form and the none too subtle repetition of themes – Gogolian almost. This coupled with the narrator's lack of humanity to wit their learing description of a tacit world order – their clinical identification with oppression – might turn off all but the author's most ardent followers.
However having said all that, I would highly recommend this work if not as a holiday text, then certainly one that can be read in a number of sittings as the nights get longer and thicker.
The author leads us like a mental patient via stories that smack at first instance of paranoia. In one of the many conversations where it is unsure whether the narrator is speaking to their self or to an apparently random but precisely informed stranger, the narrator whilst picking up a bread bun answers the charge of persecution:
"Persecuted? How, that's nonsense? How can I be persecuted by the sun raising in the east? I can be persecuted by the length of the month; that I can change like any calendar. But the sun will rise over there, and set over there, and as long as we agree to call east east and west west, then that will be the course of the sun."
That the narrator believes themselves to be persecuted is not in question as soon becomes clear in later dialogues. The inference is that if this persecution is not normal, then it is at least that which as the author puts it '...could have been readily contemplated by any commuter on the Clapham Omnibus.'
In the section interspersed with the works labelled Irulan's diaries, the author quotes enigmatic statements hinting at the modus operandi of the tacit world order '...claim victim status and using sophistry stain your opponent's character.' It is at this point that the works truly comes to live as the narrator takes us on a mad cap adventure to rid the world of head lice. To quote:
'New York I crowd sourced my way in to the elevator of the advertising agency going up mind the doors please vivre est une chute horizontal i repeated to myself in to the belly of the beast so to speak like other strangers with jet lag and a head full of sudafed I prepared to meet the lieutenants; like Hesse I knocked upon the doors along the corridor until I reached the one with no answer. I knocked again and having no reply I slipped my treatise in. This is what I wrote:"It is hypothesised in some quarters that when one species perishes it is replaced with another perhaps metaphysical, but always platonic in form. Although I might spend time theorising on the conservation of consciousness, just as I would on that of matter and energy, to entertain notions of ghosts and ghoolies given the present rate of species extinction, would I venture be yet another diversion."'