69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess

Some books invite you in politely. 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess appears to have left the door open, removed the staircase, rearranged the furniture into a theoretical insult, and then accused you of bourgeois expectations for wanting somewhere to sit.

Stewart Home’s novel is one of those cheerfully abrasive literary objects that does not so much tell a story as mug the idea of storytelling in an alley behind the avant-garde. There is sex, death, theory, Scotland, occult suggestion, textual mischief, cultural vandalism, and the general impression that someone has taken the conventional novel, held it upside down by the ankles, and shaken out all the plot coupons. If you are hoping for a tasteful princess, a tasteful death, or indeed 69 practical craft suggestions, this may not be the household manual you require.

Home has always had a talent for treating literature as both a weapon and a bad joke played on people who take weapons too seriously. Here the title itself is a small act of public disorder: lurid, ridiculous, offensive, funny, impossible to ignore, and exactly the sort of thing that makes a bookseller wonder which algorithmic category is least likely to call the police. Is it fiction? Is it satire? Is it anti-literature? Is it a prank with footnotes? Yes, probably, and it would resent being tidied into any one of them.

The book wanders through the cultural ruins with a grin and a crowbar, taking aim at literary pretension, academic seriousness, sexual mystification, class performance, and the solemn little rituals by which readers pretend that novels are improving their souls rather than rearranging their furniture. Home’s irony is not the gentle kind that pats you on the hand and says, “What a clever reader you are.” It is the kind that moves your chair while you are sitting on it.

There is a strong flavour of the post-punk pamphlet about the whole enterprise: hostile to reverence, impatient with good taste, allergic to the nice middle-class habit of turning art into an upholstered moral experience. It belongs to the lineage of books that would rather be confiscated than praised in a Sunday supplement. It is filthy, clever, annoying, funny, wilfully awkward, and quite possibly better behaved as an object than as a reading experience, which is saying something.

And yet, underneath the provocation, there is method. Home is not merely shouting rude words in the library, though one suspects he would not object to the charge. He is playing games with repetition, genre, authorship, pornography, politics and the reader’s own appetite for narrative. The joke keeps becoming an argument. The argument keeps slipping back into the joke. By the time you decide whether you are being entertained, attacked, instructed or conned, the book has already spent several pages doing all four.

This Canongate paperback is in Good condition, which is almost disappointingly respectable for something with a title that sounds like it should have been found under a mattress in a condemned art school. It has lived a bit, survived the usual handling, and remains ready to offend, amuse, irritate and possibly educate the next owner against their better judgement.

Crappy Old Books offers it for readers who like their fiction experimental, grubby, theoretical, sarcastic, and actively hostile to behaving itself. A normal blurb would try to reassure you. This one can only advise caution, curiosity, and perhaps a firm surface on which to place your expectations before Stewart Home knocks them over.

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