Well, this is a strange little fellow. Nominally a sci-fi book and full of the vaguely scientific sounding terminology that’s just obscure enough to appear believable in the half light, it’s slightly un-nerving to find this speaking more frequently of darkness and terrors un-named than owt else. A navigator is found floating in the 4K cold of deep space sans spacesuit, the only survivor of a ‘flicker jump’ which has vanished the rest of the crew and the ship into somewhere else, or perhaps nowhere. How did he survive?

Much of your time spent with this book will consist of re-reading passages trying to work out what the Dickens is supposed to be going on, what the relevance of it is and where it’s heading. If you’re anything like me you’ll fail utterly at these tasks, but not mind too much as it’s written with an oddly lulling flow of prose that I’d almost consider pretentious, if I didn’t suspect with some part of my mind that it’s just been written by someone who’s cleverer than I am.

Its succinct length means that it isn’t around for quite long enough to fully make my mind up on that issue, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. I can’t honestly call it an enjoyable read, but it’s certainly an interesting one and rather different from the usual fare.

If Harry Hill isn’t one of your favourite comedians, there’s something very wrong with you. Very much one of the funniest men on the planet, it came as something of a surprise to stumble on this here novel what he done wrote whilst wandering around my local library. I must have sustained damage to my Harry Hill radar a few years ago, as this had not appeared on it at all.

Eagerly I tucked into the book, before deciding that my time would be better spent reading it. How could it fail? The blurb claims it will have men throwing artificial feet at the Communist Party Chairman, and Willie Whitelaw trying to marry a parrot! Genius!

Tragically, and there’s no-one more upset about it than me, it’s not terribly good. With a vague excuse about it being a coma fantasy, conventional narrative takes a back seat to the sort of episodic ramblings that give the distinct impression of each chapter being a proposed line from a stage show that didn’t make the cut spun out and spread thin.

It’s not helped by the fact that much of what makes Harry’s individual brand of offbeat shenanigans work so well is his delivery. I’m not quite so good at that sort of thing so this is concordantly less amusing than I’ve no doubt it is inside Harry’s noggin. If you want a coherent story, which I rather suspect you wouldn’t from anything this chap does, you’ll be disappointed, but if even you’re just after the funny-funny this misses far more than it hits. Stick with the videos.