Lanterna Rally

Author: Geoff Nicholson

Publisher: ABRAMS

Published: 1999-06-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1468305352

“A darkly comic cornucopia set in a mythic London department store” from the author of Hunters & Gatherers, “a comic satirist of biting precision” (Kirkus Reviews). “Powered by a fast-moving plot, this latest exuberant fantasy concerns a department store, a female employee-turned-terrorist upon whom the reclusive proprietor exercises his droit de seigneur, and a porter who stumbles upon the hidden tunnels in which the building’s architect entombed himself in the 1930s. Nicholson has a wonderful ear for the unintentionally funny clichés of modern speech and manners.” —The Sunday Telegraph “An off-beat tale with a sardonic edge, Nicholson’s brightly lit black comedy takes place in Haden Brothers, a monstrous London department store that is a combination of Harrod’s, Kafka’s Castle and the Marx Brothers’ The Big Store . . . An exhaustively entertaining farce.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “It is the black humor and the satire that win us over to Nicholson’s novels. Haden’s sexual romps, Chalmers’ desire to recreate Vietnam in the store, the greed of both customers and management and poor little Charlie Mayhew who finally discovers his art form (but how pitiful it is)—no-one is safe from Nicholson’s savagery. Read it and join Charlie, Anton, Arnold Haden and Edward Zander in a trip through the bowels of consumer society.” —The Modern Novel “Nicholson’s minor characters—slimy personnel manager Derek Snell, paramilitary security chief Ray Chalmers, Anton Heath, the anarchist-wanna-be foreman of the work-averse porters, and Vita’s kleptomaniac mother, who worked for the store herself years ago—are small Dickensian gems, and Nicolson’s clockwork emporium provides a vivid setting for this very British yet universal comedy of modern manners and morals.” —Booklist