ISBN: 979-8267255189
Welcome to Craven’s Bristol – a city where every committee becomes a kangaroo court, every philanthropist a pagan oracle, and every cause célèbre an excuse for public indignation.
Into this whirlpool blunders Helix Folt, a hapless Tory innocent confronted with arts bureaucrats, therapeutic nannies, and the small-beer zeal of pub-room radicals. He is tugged from massage parlours to mock tribunals, from octopus-rights crusades to civic pageantry, learning at each turn that virtue in Bristol comes laced with ridicule and rot.
Richard Craven here turns George Eliot inside out, offering not moral earnestness but comic abjection, a panorama of civic grotesque in which the only constant is the lavatory. Helix Folt the Conservative extends Craven’s Bristol canon with the same reckless erudition and gleeful indecorum that marked Amoeba Dick, Odour Issues and Pretty Poli.
Sensitive souls may recoil. The rest are invited to drink deeply from this cracked chamberpot of a novel.
| Crass Cheseham | Proprietor of the Fascist Dictatorship of Stokes Croft |
| Don Quicksotte | CEO of Idiot Left Energy |
| Handjob Luncheon | Provincial merchant bank |
| Helix Folt | Helix Folt is the earnest yet catastrophically naïve Mangotsfield foundling whose striving for moral rectitude propels him through Bristol’s ideological and intestinal underworlds. |
| Lord Handjob | Dissipated provincial merchant banker |
| Minerva Ledwitch | Edwardian-seeming proponent of organo-fascism |
| Mr Jagtar Singh | Chauffeur to Sir Hearty Luncheon |
| Mr Luvvertory | Costa's assistant |
| Ms. Gamina Dročerpyatova | Executive assistant to Dr Mark Wankstain, prostituted by Mr Roger Buggery |
| Sir Ezra Tertiary-Syphilis | Insolvency and corporate taxation practitioner |
| Sir Hearty Luncheon | Depressive provincial merchant banker |
| Fascist Dictatorship of Stokes Croft | Some kind of arts & cultural centre, it is believed |
| The Old Disgrace | Pub at the bottom of Snandrews Road |