The Fandom of the Operator Book

Another deranged performance from Robert Rankin: The Fandom of the Operator mixes surreal silliness, ghastly old jokes and a vein of apocalyptic bleakness, as in his previous novel Web Site Story.Young hero or anti-hero Gary Cheese grows up in a warped 1950s Brentford with two main interests: death, and the Lazlo Woodbine private-eye novels (see Waiting for Godalming) by PP Penrose. When this revered author dies, it's only logical that Gary and his bestest friend Dave should plan to crash the wake and reanimate him with voodoo. Black comedy follows, with highly uncomic results.Years later, Gary at 22 has a dead-end telecomms job of stupefying tedium. He waits for a light to come on, and turns it off. That's all. This work is implausibly connected to the FLATLINE project--phone contact with the afterlife. The dead can reveal bizarre and terrible secrets, but meanwhile there's a lot Gary hasn't been telling us about his own history. Just how many people has he killed? Or was it actually him? The mixture includes a barman who senses customers' True Names ("If it isn't the Honourable Valdec Firesword, Archduke of Alpha Centuri"),unlikely celebrity parties, car chases, copious and disgusting zombie sex, alien mind control, yet another secret base under Mornington Crescent tubestation, an ever-growing body count, and so many onion-layers of conspiracy and secret masters as to produce an effect of cosmic, transcendent pointlessness. Eat your heart out, Philip K Dick. Robert Rankin is uniquely off-the-wall, unparalleled in his eccentricity: there's no other comic fantasy author like him. Thank heavens for that. --David LangfordRead More