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Not Tonight Neil

The first-person narrator of Not Tonight Neil is a cartoonist so the novel draws on the research into cartoon and caricature which I carried out for my critical book Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction (2008), and which also contributed to my essay ‘(Post)- modernist Rhythms and Voices: Sitwell and Smith to Shapcott and Hill’, which appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), edited by Jane Dowson. The key tradition here is the one which includes William Hogarth and James Gillray and more recent figures such as Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, and which deconstructs notions of the ‘fully-rounded’ character and replaces it with imagery related to machines and animals. The reliability of the first-person narration is thereby questioned because the reader is made aware that the narrator’s outlook is profoundly anti-realistic. This was combined in my novel with references to multiple genres, designed similarly to destabilise notions of the ‘real’, and which involved research into detective fiction as practiced by writers such as Raymond Chandler but also, more relevantly, in postmodern takes on the genre by, for example, Paul Auster, and into contemporary novels (eg Graham Swift’s Waterland and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor) which deploy multiple time-frames.