Character
Helix Folt is the earnest yet catastrophically naïve Mangotsfield foundling whose striving for moral rectitude propels him through Bristol’s ideological and intestinal underworlds.
Helix Folt begins life as the bewildered foundling of Mangotsfield, raised among toy windmills, malfunctioning New Age paraphernalia, and the swampy benevolence of his adoptive crone, Minerva Ledwitch. Burdened with an overdeveloped sense of propriety and a constitutional susceptibility to scandal, Folt clings to a vision of moral order that Bristol swiftly pulverises. His attempts at uprightness render him instead a magnet for the city’s predators and grotesques: the grant-pillaging Crass Cheseham, the gibbering Dr Mark Wankstain, various bigamists, demimondaines, and octopi-related apparatchiks. Folt’s conservatism is less political conviction than survival instinct, a trembling attempt to impose form on a universe intent on humiliating him. Through him, the Chronicles chart a comic anatomy of bewilderment in the face of civic derangement.
Appears in:
Helix Folt, the Conservative