Mike Batt’s “The Hunting of the Snark”

Rummaging through a forgotten drawer the other day, I dug out a dusty collection of ancient audio cassettes that hadn’t seen the light of day for years. Among them was a real oddment: a musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, which tells the story of a motley ship’s crew who come ashore in a strange land, in search of a mysterious creature called – you guessed it – the Snark.

The true nature of the Snark is never revealed. At various stages we learn that t...