Michael Glover

This curious and wearisomely long novel, the third of a trilogy, and set in Ashford, Kent, is partly an exercise in the fantastical impregnated by the historically serendipitous, and partly a crudely shaped slab of kitchen-sink realism, complete with passages of high comedy. These two elements strain to come together, to knit into some seamless whole, but, ultimately, they remain yawningly apart from, and on occasions almost entirely invisible to, each other. What is more, these looming elements of the fantastical never become sufficiently realised, or even sufficiently comprehensible, for the reader to be able to weigh — or even properly to register — their emotional impact upon each other.

'Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity,' remarks Augusten (pronounced You-gusten, by the way) Burroughs as he creeps towards the end of what must be one of the strangest and most engrossingly repellent memoirs of dysfunctional American family life ever to be published. Who is Augusten Burroughs anyway? Exactly. He is a nobody who is interested in nothing but writing about himself. And this book is that obsession made manifest. Everything is grotesque about it, from first almost to last. I say almost because the last few pages turn a touch poker-faced, if not moralistic - which is quite out of keeping with the freewheeling dottiness of 99 per cent of it.

Sven Lindqvist used to be a fairly flabby intellectual Swede with a natural disclination to engage in any kind of sporting activity whatsoever (well, he did a bit of sluggish swimming) - especially team sports. Then, at some point before 1988 (when this book was first published in Sweden), by which time he had reached the precarious age of 53, he met a rather threatening, gleamingly muscle-bound skinhead in a gym who changed his life. No, he didn't fall in love with the man. He fell in love with the idea - and the ideals - of body-building. The skinhead was himself a body-builder - every last, well defined pectoral testified to that fact. Sven, being a sedentary writer, had always pooh-poohed the whole thing - how vain, ridiculous, self-serving!