Rhyme, reason and a dream of Freud

What You Want Or, The Pursuit of Happiness By Constantine Phipps (Quercus, £20)

The upbeat hero of this bizarre, determinedly Dantean novel once dreamed of becoming an archaeologist. Instead, following a final rejection from his estranged wife, he gulps down a lethal cocktail of whisky and sleeping pills and plunges into a dream in which he digs up his own tortured past — and that of civilisation itself. Or so it seems.

Composed entirely in rhyming verse, this enjoyably wobbly narrative is set in a vast, over-the-top, international theme park, populated by waxwork puppets representing not only our hero’s parents, in-laws and all the girlfriends with whom he has betrayed his wife, even a one-night-stand prostitute, but also world figures of the status of Aristotle, at least two American presidents and other notables of whom some readers may not have heard.

Coming to the narrator’s immediate aid is a cigar-smoking bearded bloke, none other than Sigmund Freud. In the pages that follow, the long-dead founder of psychoanalysis guides his new friend, or patient, around a series of animated tableaux depicting things like Sex, Money, Beauty, Aggression and finally Religion. All the mechanics of a collapsing marriage are soon unveiled, violence erupts, a heavy jade ashtray hurtles through the air and the reader is bombarded from all sides by conflicting pronouncements from the great and the good: “Happiness doesn’t come if you look for it”, “All team sport is a substitute for war”, “Religious folk detest other people’s creeds”, “Women always end up being caught unawares by their own beauty”, “A man should never let his life be run by his willy” and so forth.

There are times when this book feels like a bit of a battlefield itself but the effort of struggling through the crossfire is hugely rewarding. Happiness and unhappiness soon pour off the page and the gloriously wonky rhyming — “freaks” does not rhyme with “unique” — seems to echo the protagonist’s inner angst. At the end of the day, the ghostly psychoanalyst fades away and his patient wakes up from his coma to confront his beloved wife once more. Like all good story-tellers, the author keeps us in suspense about the final outcome until the very last paragraph.

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