Halfway through this book I discovered a receipt which suggested that it had been originally purchased in 1981 at Heathrow Airport for one pound ninety. No real point to make about that, just thought it was interesting.

So much of the English literary fiction I've read lately has featured protagonists who are fairly horrible people, or who come across that way. (Darley from the Alexandria Quartet comes across as massively pretentious and self-involved but turns out to be perfectly nice and personable and self-effacing in person.) Intellectual, superior, condescending, pungently opinionated, self-obsessed but compelling and, naturally, absolutely fantastic writers. Charles Arrowby is a particularly monstrous creation, his ego forged in the fires of the theatrical world where he dominated, god-like, over the productions he directed. Completely and thoroughly up himself in a way that is hard to credit, he takes routine, everyday joy in the failures and set-backs of his friends and contemporaries, and sets himself up as a self-exiled Prospero in his remote cliff-top cottage: statesman, sage and retired wizard, waiting for his spirits, malign and blessed, to come serve and appease him.

The first thing that happens is the vision of a sea-serpent rising from the waves. What this portends is ambiguous. Frankly it could symbolise anything, from a break with everyday reality to the devouring beast of jealousy that is about to consume Charles or the eastern mysticism of his cousin James. Assigning simple one-to-one correspondences seems almost vulgar, but perhaps in keeping with the theatrical backdrop.

The next thing that happens is the sprites duly arrive, separately, a Caliban and an Ariel in the form of two women, one of whom is afflicted with love, the other with hate, both upsetting his equanimity with their demands. Then, like a shipwreck crashing on his rocks, a childhood sweetheart appears, and the serpent of love and jealousy and obsession thrashes onto shore and starts to eat everything in sight.

A campaign of comic terror begins as Charles invades and disrupts his childhood sweetheart's married, though not blissfully, life. Charles is a Shakesperean idiot, plotting and manipulating and lying and interfering and speechifying and generally capering about in a self-deluded frenzy. Hartley and her husband are an Ortonian kitchen-sink drama married couple, locked in a possibly mutually abusive relationship, him with anger and jealousy and her with mental issues and a cringing meekness, both dependent on each other however bad things might seem. A missing adopted son rounds off the classically dysfunctional twentieth century British lower middle class nuclear family. It all culminates in kidnapping and captivity and it's sort of funny and sort of skin-crawling, which I suppose is very much the point.

The whole thing is told by Charles, an unreliable narrator utterly reliable in his self-serving delusions. He constantly uses flipping inverted commas for 'everyday phrases' or 'common cliches' as if to underline his remoteness from everyday reality and honest down-to-earth emotions that cannot compete with the flamboyancy of theatrical life. It drives you crazy, but a distinctive voice emerges and is sustained through to the end when Prospero finally returns, books drowned and staff snapped, to Milan, ego more or less intact and any moral development possibly on a scale too tiny for the human eye to appreciate.

This won the Booker, and it's as daft and peculiar as a brush. I shall look askance at 'literary types' who turn their noses up at 'genre fiction' in the future. No amount of lovely writing can disguise the fundamentally unreal oddness of this book. Not that I'm complaining. I'm just saying, is all.