The Queue

by Jonathan Barrow

A wild picaresque fantasy, erotically polymorphous . . . with a cast of bizarre humans and talking animals Independent on Sunday I glance down and see a dachshund nosing at my ankles. She is a stray. Together we walk to the station cafeteria and queue for 25 minutes to get tea and pies. Round her neck is a disk and it tells me her name is Mary. The narrator and Mary alcoholic, drug-addicted, nymphomaniac embark on a dizzying odyssey through the abattoirs, strip clubs, prison cells, lunatic asylums and sewers of England. Encounters with hens, giant wood pigeons, snakes and many other species punctuate their progress. Bodily fluids flow profusely. Sexual malpractice is never more than a page away. Written in the months before his death in a car crash in 1970 at the age of twenty-two, Jonathan Barrow s The Queue is a book that doesn t know when to say when. It s a satire on the professional world; a mockery of the laws of good taste; a children s story turned inside out, wound around a core of innocence and affection.

122 pages, Paperback

Published July 30, 2012