Auguste / Matador (ePub)

What happens when you wake up one morning to find everything around you has changed? This is the predicament that faces the anti-hero of Keith Blackburn's latest novel, 'The Auguste'. Some people have a bad hair day. For Algy Tuckett his hair is the least of his problems. One morning in 1932 Algy, a 22-year-old junior clerk at Gurney and Barman's wool mill, awakes to find himself transformed into a frail old clown. In fact, not only his appearance, but his surroundings and the people he knows have all changed. The Oxford Dictionary defines an Auguste as a clown. This archetype is what Algy has become, the ragged character in the circus who gets the pie in his face, but surprisingly unperturbed by this, Algy attempts a pilgrimage to his office, then the doctor, determined to find a way out of the bad dream. Despite his best efforts, however, he becomes way-laid at every turn by a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters and a series of surrealistic episodes beyond his control. But don't think that this is a tortured tale of alienation. Far from being a melancholic existential outsider, Algy, in his naivety, is more akin to the hapless comic anti-hero, so beloved of British comedy films of the 1950s. 'The Auguste' is a rich and intricate novel that offers a poetic and entertaining tapestry, and manages to portray an absurd world where the way out, in some strange way, seems satisfyingly apt.