OR
A Novel
ISBN: 979-8285524762
ODYSSEY MEETS OBSCENITY IN RICHARD CRAVEN’S BRISTOL—A CITY OF FADING SPLENDOUR, BROKEN MYTH, AND THE UNMISTAKABLE WHIFF OF SOMETHING GONE VERY WRONG.
After a night spent as the front end of a pantomime horse in the Startling Farter, dissolute aristocrat Lord Snatch fails to return home to … er … Squattocrat Towers and the loving embrace of his wife, the fragrant poshtitute Kelly Snatch.
Drawing on the Odyssey but refusing its redemptions, Odour Issues replaces gods with ideologues, trials with punitive enemas, and heroism with flatulent defiance. It is an epic clogged with paperwork and metaphor, stained by ritual and rot, and propelled by a language that veers from the exalted to the excreted without apology.
Ambitious, baroque, and gleefully impure, Odour Issues advances Craven’s project to resurrect classical form in an age unworthy of it—and to see what leaks out in the process.
Richard Craven is a British-Canadian former academic philosopher who has spent the last twenty years in Bristol. Since leaving academia, he has dedicated himself to writing mordantly satirical literary fiction and the resurrection of formal verse for a 21st century readership. Odour Issues is his fifth book, following Bile, Amoeba Dick, Pretty Poli, and The Senseless Counterfeit.
| Bar Wanque | Bar on Stokes Croft |
| The Infirmary | A watering hole of the revolutionary left, haunted by the sort of people who conflate binge drinking with praxis. |
| The Startling Farter | A temple of dissolution, where the last dregs of Bristol's debauched pseudo-intelligentsia gather to dissolve into ketamine and despair. |
| Bedminster | The site of the Court of Alcinous, a degenerate parody of Homeric hospitality, where thieves, drunks, and minor aristocrats swap tall tales, narcotics and colonic irrigation. |
| Easton | A naturally occurring i.e. undesignated yobbery, with none of the advantages or connections enjoyed by Montypee. |
| Hotwells | A floating world of houseboats and sun-bleached nudists, where Clismathea and Enematopoeia sunbathe in a haze of transcendental nonsense. |
| Montypee | A designated yobbery, the haunt of drug-addled failsons of Clifton's people who attend all the right fish suppers. |
| Pex ‘n’ Quads | Gym in Hotwells Road |
| Quads & Pex down like fuckin’ Easton | A bastion of hypermasculine piety, home to the House of Muscle, where Easton's steroidal sages dispense wisdom between sets. |
| Squattocrat Towers | Home of Lord & Lady Snatch and their tiger St Just |
| St Werbuggers | Suburb in East-Central Bristol |
| Stokes Croft | A festering sink of anarchist utopianism, where reality bends under the weight of unwashed idealists and performance art. |
| Charybdis | Jacuzzi in P 'n' Q |
| Don Quicksotte | CEO of Idiot Left Energy |
| Enematopoeia | Handmaiden to Illingworth the colonist |
| Handjob Luncheon | Provincial merchant bank |
| Harrison Lupin | Predator |
| Ianeass the Gimp | Sacred chess loon |
| Illingworth | Colonic irrigation therapist in Knowle |
| Lady Snatch | Lord Snatch's wife, poshtitute |
| Lord Snatch | Trust-funded squattocrat |
| Mr Vagus | Bankrupt who died in his workshop in the shadow of Horfield Gaol |
| Sir Ezra Tertiary-Syphilis | Insolvency and corporate taxation practitioner |
| St Just | Lord Snatch's gofer |