The editor of a magazine for ageing ex-pats, Feathergills, enraged by the awarding of top national art prizes for dirty beds, lines of bricks and light bulbs, sends his only reporter/dogsbody to enrol as a student at Doomscombe College in Devon, a "filthy hotbed for the filthy avant-garde", where "they draw the students in, fresh-faced innocents aching to become proper British artists… and turn them into loonies". Lewis' job as 'mole' will be to report to Feathergills' magazine Silverback "straight from the heart of that den of iniquity." And he does just that, the novel charting his relationships with the students there, and the various 'installations' they prepare and present.

Put like that, doesn't sound too exciting, does it? Wait…

Once again, as in ‘Pig’, the viewpoint character is an unreformed male, the highly biased, cynical, but wickedly humorous Lewis Sylvester Godcock, not that dissimilar to PIG's Morgan Jones-Jones. Ms Granville clearly feels an affinity with unredeemed enemies of her sex, which future biographers may probe delightedly. Trying to keep awake during a lecture, for instance, Lewis ponders: "what did signifiers have to do with cultural studies? And who cared whether a sodding bunch of red roses was signified, signifier, or sign, as long as the bloody giver got his leg over?" An admirably pragmatic attitude. He feels contempt for both his boss' outdated attitudes, and for the ethos of Doomscombe. Tolerance is not his great virtue – a plump companion is "her lardship", "hippo-woman", etc. He has always been obsessed with death, and this shows in the various 'art' projects he undertakes, involving fish (putrefying), maggots (ebullient), hedgehogs (squashed and rolled like papyrus), and any bones, skulls, etc, that he can find. His justification is that people try to ignore death and decomposition, but "Why can't we accept it and what happens?"

From the moment he arrives at the college, he is caught in a no-quarter-given feud with another student, an Irish woman called Gob – the name being the initial letters of her full name, but reflecting only too well her prime characteristic. She finds it impossible to produce a sentence without one or more 'feckin's in it. This at first can irritate, but after a time it almost becomes invisible, it is so much a part of her character. She is, as Lewis puts it, quite simply "a loose cannon". Upon being caught out in a minor theft, she first denies all knowledge, then 'turned the vilification volume up to maximum, lunged, kicked, pulled, pinched, scratched, became incoherent…' She's rabidly anti-church, although always using the names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: of priests, she says, "Ah sure if they had their feckin way they'd be walking around giving the last feckin rites to the feckin menstrual flow". Her attempted seduction of Lewis in what must be the most disgusting bedroom in literature, and her reaction to a rebuff, is hilarious. When she tries to be nice, even her 'feckin flea-bitten shite' mongrel dog is suspicious: 'Arwen's ears were flat against her head and her eyes were wary.' (Arwen provides one of my favourite lines of the whole book: the landlady of a pub, refusing to let the dog in, says "a drinking dog's nothing but trouble".) For me, Gob is much funnier than dowdy old classics like Falstaff, though like him she is built on a few basic traits with an undercurrent of humanity running underneath.

Somewhere behind it all there may be a love story, but there is certainly no Hollywood blandness here. As a fellow student says: "Gob hates Lewis with the deep and abiding hate that indicates a contrary emotion bubbling beneath the surface", but "hate is how it'll stay, knowing you two." Their never-ending feud finally leads to the setting on fire of the Great Hall, and the end of both their student careers. As they escape, Lewis' final unromantic thought is, "Oh God, surely Gob wasn't the past, present, and future he had to come to terms with…"

But these are not the only oddballs: another student thinks he's a tree, and acts accordingly until his upper branches get burned off, another believes she comes from another planet and has become obese from studying terran eating habits, another is constantly taking mushroom trips, and yet another is a coquettish transsexual (who has developed a 'cleavage-flashing, susceptible-man-present routine'). Even minor characters are given the Granville treatment, such as the student counsellor who wears a Homer Simpson tee-shirt in order to appear 'hip' – but underneath has an uncool collar and tie!

A good part of the novel is taken up with the 'installations' the students have to produce. Lewis has been tricked into joining, not a Visual Arts course, but a 'Writing as Performance' course. The various assignments they are given are so nutty as to be unbelievable – though it appears that many of them were/are in fact set by the institution in question (you'll soon work out Doomscombe's real name): 'Create a short text to be written or inscribed on a variety of (four) surfaces with a variety of instruments'; or 'Observe people in the act of writing' – anywhere, anything. So what happens if you write the text on the moving maggots from inside a putrefying trout? Though the tone is always tongue-in-cheek, some serious criticisms are made of the Art College in question: the glorious face shown by the International Summer School is not on show for the all-year-round students, who are taught in damp conditions in sheds, with no materials – that is, if they are 'taught' at all, since the second and third years simply disappear until the end of the year. "All round scam really", says one of the characters. There is also satire of the art collecting world – an easy target, of course, but cleverly done with people happily forking out for Lewis' hollowed-out bibles full of bones.

All the way through, the sheer invention of the writer shines out. The novel is studded with memorable scenes like stars in the night sky seen from the Keck Telescopes: Lewis' Mam, convinced he de-limbs live sheep: "What time will you be tearing apart the sheep, Lewis? I only ask because it's a long drive back and Puw's got his cows to milk"; Lewis getting away with not doing an assignment in which the material used to produce a word must itself reflect the meaning of that word, by claiming he 'wrote' the word 'ephemeral' upon the surface of a stream; texts written on live maggots; the gloriously erudite yet rapacious Mr Feathergills, who reminded me of Uncle Monty in ‘Withnail and I’, except that he prefers the opposite sex; a 'poetry' reading consisting of three words; Lewis falling into Lyra's trap and publicly illustrating the text about the left hand not knowing what the right one is doing; Dickensian eccentrics, like Schnider the policeman or Pierre the 'kneecker' crazy French lorry driver, in whose company Lewis discovers that "occ-occ-occupied knickersh dangerush shings"; Gob's Virgin-and-Scarlet-Woman sabotaged by Lewis; the cruelly accurate thumbnail sketches of such towns as Totnes, Plymouth, or Cheltenham, with its Neptune inexplicably miles away from the sea.

Then there is the language itself. As in ‘Pig’, the wit, vivacity, and sheer intelligence of Granville's prose flashes like an aurora borealis on speed. You'll search in vain for a boring sentence. The humour here is so successful because it is so well wrapped. (I was not surprised to find out that Granville has won various prizes, including BBC, Waterstones, and Writers' West.)

So, no infelicities at all? Almost none. There is a section which is rather out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the book, with Lewis trapped in an underground cave on Dartmoor. The episode is used to allow him to come to terms with his obsession with death, but this obsession never really convinced me (on a serious level), despite the time devoted to it. Again, Lyra, 'a female of considerable size', is presented at the beginning as completely mad, claiming to be from another planet and a few hundred years old, but all this is quietly forgotten as she becomes the voice of reason (and of the writer?) in this insane world. But these are minor quibbles.

There is, however, another quibble, nothing to do with the stunning quality of the writing. Although the book itself has a very attractive cover, the price is unusually high, even for the necessarily more expensive independent press. But this is not the fault of the writer, and I would still urge you to buy it, if you like highly original, ferociously funny, surreal, superbly executed fiction. Not to purchase it because of the price would in this case be a completely false economy. Given a fair chance, this unique book would surely enjoy a great cult success.

Steve Redwood is the author of ‘Fisher of Devils’ (Prime Books USA) and ‘Who Needs Cleopatra?’ (Reverb Books). He has shared a consulting room with Michael Moorcock and other extremely dubious quacks in the World Fantasy Award runner-up Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, cracked a joke or two with Neil Gaiman and assorted pranksters in ‘The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy’, trembled with frightful and/or fleshless creatures in Darkness Rising 2005 and Barebone 8, and deservedly Met his Maker in ‘Deathgrip: Exit Laughing’ (Hellbound Books). His spirit will also be up to no good in Strange Pleasures 5 and ‘Until Someone Loses an Eye’.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.