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Wow, this book destroyed me. Beautiful, oneiric, sexy, deadpan, linguistically inventive � and then in the end remorselessly tragic.

You know what reading this book is like? It's like you're sitting there having fun, the sun's shining � and who do you see bouncing towards you but the most adorable, cute little character you can imagine. The Andrex puppy, say�



Aw, look! It's the Andrex puppy! C'mere, little fella! And he bounds over to you, his little tail wagging away, birds tweeting in the background, ah the warm sun on your face.

And then � just as you open your arms to give him a big hug � suddenly you realise that there's a slightly rabid look in his eye. And just as you start to press his cuddly little body into yours, OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK his sharp little teeth are ripping into the soft flesh of your throat, WHAT ARE YOU DOING ANDREX PUPPY and he's growling away, claws slashing, AAAUGH arterial blood is spurting all over the grass and the daisies and OH MY GOD YOU'RE DEAD.

YOU WERE KILLED BY THE ANDREX PUPPY, THE CUTEST CREATURE ALIVE.


I am a Photoshop master

Well fuck you, Boris Vian! And fuck everyone else that wrote reviews making this sound like a cuddly love-fest! Did you all stop reading after 150 pages, or what??

What makes this book so deeply affecting is that the world it offers you is the most charming and wonderful fictional environment I've encountered for years. After fifty pages I wanted to curl up and live in it. The laws of physics are different here: everything is soft and yielding and in tune with your moods. It is like a sort of magic realism avant la lettre, only less irritating and laboured: what it really reminds me of most of all is the fluid, anything-can-happen creativity of Through the Looking-Glass. This is a world where you go on a date, and things like this happen:

They walked, following the first pavement they came to. A little pink cloud came down from the sky and approached them.
‘May I?� it suggested.
‘Go ahead!� said Colin; and the cloud surrounded them.
Inside, it was warm and it smelled of cinnamon sugar.
‘No one can see us any more!� said Colin. ‘But we can see them.�
‘Be careful,� said Chloé, ‘it's a little transparent.�

Ils marchaient, suivant le premier trottoir venu. Un petit nuage rose descendait de l'air et s'approcha d'eux.
� J'y vais? proposa-t-il.
� Vas-y ! dit Colin, et le nuage les enveloppa.
À l'intérieur, il faisait chaud at çs sentait le sucre à cannelle.
� On ne nous voit plus ! dit Colin... Mais nous, on les voit.
� C'est un peu transparent, dit Chloé, méfiez-vous.

And they walk along in their own little cloud, watching the other passers-by and looking in the shop windows.

On another occasion, guests at a dinner-party eat eel that was caught by the butler in his bathroom tap. One of the diners later complains to Colin about how unlikely this seems. ‘I was up all night fishing in my own taps to see if I could catch one too,� he says the next day. ‘But round our place, you only get trout.� In the middle of the table, Colin has a centrepiece ‘consisting of a jar of formaldehyde in which two chicken embryos appeared to be miming the Spectre de la Rose, in the choreography of Nijinsky�.

It is incredibly hard to pull this sort of thing off without seeming twee or annoying, and Vian just doesn't seem twee or annoying. I've stared at some of these passages till I was cross-eyed and I still don't understand how he manages it, but it works; I believe everything he says.

This is a very funny book; it owes a debt to PG Wodehouse, not least in the character of Nicolas the butler, who in my head was played by 90s Stephen Fry. It's also sexy as hell, Vian managing to succeed in that very continental tradition of respectful objectivisation, a neat oxymoron to pull off � the girls are adorable and everybody (at least at first) seems young and beautiful and comfortably-off. The latent sexiness creeps into the narrative voice in all kinds of ways: at one point a door clicks shut ‘with the sound of a bare hand on a bare bottom� (avec le bruit d'une main nue sur une fesse nue).

But what is actually going on here? Is it really just an extended adult fairy-tale? As the book goes on, you gradually realise � in my case, with a terrible sense of regret � that what Vian is really doing is setting up an Edenic picture of young love only to stress the awfulness of what comes after. You'd better have the most acrobatic sex and the most delicious meals of your life while you're still young (this novel says), because before you know it you're going to have to go out there and earn a living, and then your whole life will stop being about creativity and start being about where the money is coming from. (‘It's horrible,� Colin says at one point about work. ‘It reduces man to the ranks of machinery.�)

An old man in a white shirt with bushy hair was reading a manual behind a desk....
‘Good morning sir,� said Colin.
‘Good morning sir,� said the man.
His voice was cracked and thickened with age.
‘I've come about the job,� said Colin.
‘Oh?� said the man. ‘We've been looking for someone for a month without any luck. It's quite hard work, you know.�
‘Yes,� said Colin. ‘But it's well paid.�
‘Good Lord,� said the man, ‘it wears you out, you know, and it might not be worth the money � but it's not for me to denigrate the administration. At any rate, you can see I'm still alive.�
‘Have you been working here long?� said Colin.
‘A year,� said the man. ‘I'm 29.�
He ran a trembling, wrinkled hand across the folds of his face.

It's the novel of someone in their twenties facing the looming prospect of adult life. In keeping with the hyperbole of the book in general, respectable adulthood isn't just a chore � it's the apocalypse. Forget about wistful, wishy-washy endings � in this one all your favourite characters end up wasting away, burning to death, getting shot, having their hearts cut out, or committing suicide. Welcome to France, population: miserable.

The violence is actually there from the very beginning, in a cartoony kind of way, and Vian has a very artful way of allowing you to realise that those cartoon injuries are in fact bleeding real blood. I'd be lying if I said part of me wasn't hoping for a more life-affirming ending, but it's hard to object when you're being played so expertly. This book is like nothing you've read: a blend of Wodehouse, Huysmans, Faulkner and Lewis Carrol, all set to a pounding soundtrack of Vian's beloved boogie-woogie and blues music. It is the dream of being young and the nightmare of getting old. I fell in love with it. And I will never trust the Andrex puppy again.

(Aug 2013)