Still Life with Strangled Porcupines: Le Pain de la Solitude

Not just fantasy, but a unique blend of 'clear-minded surrealism' and mischievous earthy satire, directed to achieve a powerful end...

Philip Goddard wrote five novels from 1990 to 1993, and Still Life with Strangled Porcupines is the fourth of these. He was at that time gestating as a significant symphonic composer, and he approached his literary works as though they were music compositions, indeed all five novels and some of his short stories and poems actually being the literary equivalent of complex, organically structured symphonies, in which ideas, phrases and even individual words are treated like melodic motifs in such a symphony. At that time his particular model of symphonic organization and structuring was the late symphonies of Sibelius and especially the symphonies of the 20th Century Danish composer Vagn Holmboe - though Goddard's own musical symphonies, when they did come, were more diverse in approach.

Each of the novels defies standard (say, BISAC) categorization, overlapping equally with a number of categories - which means that labelling with any one of those categories would misrepresent the respective work.

This novel has the dubious distinction of opening with the naughty 'F' word: a dustman's purple exclamation echoes round the block when some rather unusual sharp objects in a refuse sack stick into him. Thus begins the unfolding of a crazy multifaceted satirical drama (indeed a grotesquely humorous caricature of a soap opera), whose main target is society's failure to relate to the individual, as distinct from the label, the category. In this context the common plight of the eccentric and genius is starkly portrayed.

The Government of the day has closed mental hospitals as part of what they call their 'Care in the Community Scheme', which, to put it uncharitably, has dumped inmates amongst the population at large and left them to 'stand on their own two feet' - which would be almost laudable, were it not merely politicians' language for abandoning the poor b-----s and saving a little money.

Of the various central characters the most central is Tim Bawlscroper, cruelly nicknamed the Polecat - one of a number of ex-inmates from the recently closed-down Tetch Vale mental hospital, who have been parcelled out into Council flats along a street in central Tetchborough. The narrative follows some of Tim's struggles there, starting with his brief love affair with Henry, a very affectionate polecat ferret. But Tim's life is not a happy one. Quite apart from continuing verbal bullying from his father on the phone and torment from his lonely frustrated homoeroticism, he is plagued by visitations from demons and very demoralizing angels. But then a porcupine quill mysteriously comes into his life. It appears to have the power to make the demons and angels disappear. Tim soon starts gaining success and public recognition as one of this century's greatest painters - even to the extent of beginning to overshadow such masters as Pablo Picrasso and Salvador Dalek. Nonetheless, as though cursed by God, he still has a dark and desolate cross to bear...

Talking of porcupines, yes, something mysterious and crazy is happening behind the scenes. Dead, or sometimes live, and occasionally giant, porcupines are starting to turn up, often in the most unlikely places - even inside a piano and causing sewer blockages. Black magic? Insanity of the author?

Well, any answers that do come are provided in the form of further, quite unexpected riddles. The whole process of organically evolving 'symphonic surrealism' brings about a really disturbing - even savage - turn of events that leads us to the mind-boggling multiple enigma of the end of the work.

A preface by the Author explains some inevitable questions that would be raised by this highly unorthodox work.