Fifty-Minute Hour
Nial, a woman with a man’s name, and confused about her gender – is uncertain about most things, save her obsession with John-Paul. She shares this obsession with modest Mary and conscientious Bryan. All three lead secret lives. Mary, a conventional housewife with a dream-home in the suburbs, is inflicting burns on her genitals and stockpiling vibrators; Bryan, a mother-harried city clerk, updates his Disaster Scrapbook and takes his snake to bed, seeking refuge from Chaology and the horrors of the quantum revolution; Nial swaps sex for blood-drenched dreams of an ex-Nazi butcher in the High Street. All seek help and healing from the mysterious John-Paul, but is he sage and saviour, or untrained unlicensed con-man? In her powerful and hilarious new novel, Wendy Perriam mixes the blackest of black comedy with a serious examination of madness in its many forms – the religious excesses of miracles and visions; the crazy chaos of modern phsyics; and especially the distortions of the fifty-minute hour itself; those wild or weeping sessions on the analyst’s couch. With her usual wit and gusto, she explores the murky world of the psychologically disturbed – a world as comically bizarre as it is genuinely tragic.