As you may know, Jackdaw Media have been lucky enough to secure the services of Pierre Rufus, one of the nations leading literary lights. We have been granted the exclusive rights to his work in progress ‘Untitled Novel’. You can check out Pierre’s ongoing efforts over at our special microsite - Jackdaw the Novel.

Noted homosexual and literary critic Cagewind Thunderblast, has read an early draft of the (as yet unwritten) manuscript and recently published the following review in the Times Literary Supplement.

Rufus’s latest work, ‘Untitled Work’, his first novel in almost eighteen years, is suffused with the authors perennial concerns - man and his place in an uncertain world, the decline of the western literary establishment, and the beastliness of women. The novel is a quirky vivid thing that dances in the hand, its pages majestic dolphins, leaping sea creatures named Truth and Goodness; a vision from a world more real somehow, than our own.

However, ‘Untitled’ suffers from P.R’s frequent and glaring faults as a novelist. It is gauche, absurd, slow moving, poorly plotted and deeply plagiarist. Rufus’s characters are misanthropically cast about like stock rag dolls, and many are merely thinly veiled caricatures of Rufus’s harshest critics.

To quote Suhayl Saadi, ‘The book is a Frankenstein’s golem of a thing, with all the Luciferic darkness which that implies’ - although of course he was writing about a completely different novel. Like Dumond Chint’s ergodic metafiction ‘Vulva’, ‘Untitled’ is a book both wondrous and terrible. In stark contrast to Chint, Pierre Rufus has decided that the only way to say anything of value is to state it with ironic detachment. Brilliantly, this manifests as utter sincerity, absent of any hint of insight or self knowledge. It is as if Rufus (a close friend and former lover, though only once and all to briefly at Harrow - ah Je respire l’odeur de ton corps!); fails to realise that his vile antihero Iago Coakes - the bastard son of Amis’s John Self, and Updyke’s Rabbit Angstrom, is a thinly veiled self portrait. A man in full, as it were. Just as Wolfe’s bellicose Charlie Croker faces the modern world secure in a delusion of competence, so Rufus’s Coakes is an Ecoian archetype, a stirring confession of bewilderment.

‘Untitled’ is a cry for help which should without delay convince the authorities to section its author in some psychiatric institution, where a thorough regime of shocks and water treatments of great cruelty and dubious medical value must be administered, until he be cured or perish as a drooling sacrifice on the alter of psychiatric medicine (for Rufus is, of course, a Scientologist).

Brilliant, bleak, heart warming and vainglorious, ‘Untitled’ will doubtless continue to be fired from the iron barrel of the literary canon for many a Times best seller list to come.

Sir Cagewind Thunderblast OBE

If you’re enjoying our serialization of Pierre Rufus’s new novel, you might enjoy some of the masters early work, available at all good literary book shops.

Non Fiction

‘Myra Hindley: If I did it’
‘Take that, a life in music’
‘Tackle - a living history of bollocks’

Fiction

‘Fauntroy’s travails’
‘Butternut Gulag’
‘The 20th Century, a novel’