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I enjoy a bit of a hot mess every now and again and Bradley Pearson delivers. At 58 he's a retired inspector for the Inland Revenue Service, freed to compose the long dormant literary masterpiece stewing inside him. But life seems intent on thwarting his artistic ambition. We have a recently widowed ex-wife and her mendicant brother returning to town and intent on his attentions, a best-selling literary rival who is sure he's killed his wife, their naive daughter who's seeking a literature tutor, as well as a hopelessly depressed sister finding herself at the precipice of a divorce. Every time Bradley attempts to escape to the country he is beset by doorbells, phone calls, and visitations that unleash antic frenzies that border on farcical. All rendered with with the flowery prose of Bradley himself, attempting a highbrow work of thoughtful erudition, at the same time delivering an overwrought mass market tale that he would disdain had it come from his literary rival Arnold Baffin. Despite the barely contained hysteria on the page there seems to be a stiff rod of prim propriety throughout, where you imagine everyone still stopping for tea with their pinkie's raised.

Is this a middle-aged fantasy where it seems that every woman Bradley encounters is intent on his affections? Humbert Humbert style intellectual gymnastics wrapped in flowery philosophical prose to justify a May-December romance? An unreliable closeted narrator wrestling with his own sexuality? A last ditch attempt to write a commercial piece of sensationalistic fiction to grasp at relevance? All and none of the above. Bradley's story is bookended with two forwards and six postscripts that further confound any sense of what's to come and what has passed. I have to say, it's certainly a dim view of middle-aged marriage in the end.