Author note: Stewart Lee is a stand up comedian who has worked in both British radio and television. He is best known for the BBC series ‘Lee and Herring’, ‘Fist of Fun’ and ‘This Morning, with Richard not Judy’ which he co-wrote and performed with Richard Herring. Can good performance comedians become talented novelists? Against the ominous backdrop of Robert Newman’s dire ‘Dependence Day’, Stewart Lee has now picked up the torch. This is his first novel.

The story is alternately told in South London and the desert wastelands of Arizona, displaying a cast of cross-cultural and world-weary characters. Some are desperate and running, but most initially seem resigned to what fate has given them. Sometimes this is the symptom of suburban drug culture, sometimes a result of psychiatric illness, but the general effect is to make them too acceptant to realise they still have options. Common to all the major characters is the inability to move on with their lives until completing a personal quest of one form or another. This factor is the writer’s device to make the central players stand out from their surroundings.

Meet Sid & Danny – friends from a dismal tribute band who missed their ticket to stardom by leaving a group that went on, rather annoyingly, to make it big. They’re not bitter of course, or at least they won’t be until they run out of spliffs. There’s the Golumn-like Peter Rugg, who lost a cigarette butt down the back of a sofa years before and, a true searcher, is devoting his existence to finding it. Rugg’s devotion marks this small aspect of the story as a modern age grailquest that has echoes in every other central character’s life. Another strong thread is the looming iconic figure of Luther Peyote, the long forgotten musical hero that draws Sid & Danny across the world. A man who managed to live hard, burn out and still got to fade away. Luther has a life like a waking dream and does not comprehend how others may idolise him. He starts the story more as an object than a person, as Sid & Danny feel driven to make their peace with him before their creative lives can restart. Luther himself is happy to be left alone in his backwater, ignorant of fate’s need for him to show what he can do in the eventual cathartic healing process required to provide a satisfying close to the story.

Lee’s fully formed characters don’t stop there as more lifestories are gradually added to the mix and explored: Bob Nequatewa (‘The Perfect Fool’ of the title) is the last of the traditional Hopi Indian clowns, and as such belongs to a past being swept aside by the forces of cultural change. One poor man, about to be sectioned for vaguely suspecting he’s an astronaut, cracks away at a keyboard in the café Cyberama until Sid & Danny sadistically confuse him with their re-cycled conspiracy theories. Tracey is a suspected felon, always moving on and somehow locked into an eternal savage road-movie. She is aware of her unrelenting fate and stoical when losing every man she meets to self destruction. She reflects the Hopi Indian legend the reader is given; of Kohkang Wuhti the spider woman who makes pairs of people out of clay, but occasionally misses a beat to leave someone fatalistically alone. Tracey is a trailer-trash femme fatale who gives the spider woman’s choice, calmly announcing what is going to happen to a prospective boyfriend in advance, thus abdicating personal responsibility for their demise.

I think I can give you a warning of my own. In the first hundred pages you’ll hate this novel. You will put it down on several occasions and go back to it after a few days to give it another chance. The threads of the tale will seem both unconnected and meaningless. The continuous Hopi references will strike you as strange and unnecessary. The book will read like a very relaxed detective story where you don’t get the plot or any clues. After those initial pages the stories will drift towards each other and… bang! You’re hooked. The novel has a certain lazy, dreamlike quality. Not quite ‘Lost Horizon’ , but more as if a young Jack Kerouac had just bust out of Balham. Moments of prejudicial persecution and undefined fear are introduced through Sheriff Hopkins – a catalyst in a crumpled hat, designed to keep the reader nervous. This American policeman is one of the best psychologically constructed characters I’ve read in a while. He is clearly more disturbed than those he chases, yet blind to the damage as he wears away at those around him until something has to give. Ultimately this is a book for thirtysomethings who are sure they had the talent, know they missed out on doing what they were born to do and suspect that if they chanced their arm, perhaps they may still have time. This theme may well leave you reviewing your own life plan.

The author has clearly studied the anthropology of the proud Hopi in depth (prouder than the tourist conscious Sioux anyway) and the glimpses the reader is given resolve into a broad-stroke impression of their practicality and thinking. It is then easy to see that the Hopi can never merge with developed ‘Western’ society without irreparable tarnishing. The gulf in humour and morality is then explored dramatically when the Hopi clown is invited onto a TV chatshow.

The final theme used in this book is more universal and obvious. Everyone seems to be writing about the Holy Grail nowadays as so many in modern society feel strangely incomplete. It’s the ultimate metaphor for what you think you need to make yourself content. You will never attain it, and even if you did, a) you would realise you don’t really need it after all (it was just what drove you), and b) your new problem would be how to hide it now the whole world wants it more than you. Hot potato.

I expected pulp, but this is [eventually] a graceful and meaningful book which deserves to be more widely known. Possibly it’s just been written out of time and should have been another 1957 classic. Many new authors write about their own life and consequently have only one book in them. This is not one of those. Although initially jerky and disparate, the subject matter is imaginative and intriguing. I hope Stewart Lee writes another, I really do.