Peeping Tom
Chapters (27)
Contents
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Howard Jacobson
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Part Two
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Copyright
About the Book
About the Book
Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century – and by Barney as a ‘prurient little Victorian ratbag’.
This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her ‘rampant marvellings’, to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and growing as he stomps the wild Atlantic cliffs on long, morbid walks, tampering with the truth, tangling with the imperious Camilla – and telling a riotous tale.
About the Author
About the Author
Howard Jacobson is the author of eleven novels and four works of non-fiction. He won the Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing in 1999 for The Mighty Walzer. His latest novel, The Finkler Question, won the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
Also by Howard Jacobson
Also by Howard Jacobson
Fiction
Coming from Behind
Redback
The Very Model of a Man
No More Mister Nice Guy
The Mighty Walzer
Who’s Sorry Now?
The Making of Henry
Kalooki Nights
The Act of Love
The Finkler Question
Non-Fiction
Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)
In the Land of Oz
Roots Schmoots
Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy
Dedication
FOR ROSALIN – WHO INSTIGATED, HATCHED AND REARED THIS, AND LOOKED TO ME TO LEGITIMIZE IT MERELY.
Title Page
Prologue
PROLOGUE
Remember to keep faith with those three great sources of your strength: Earth, Sea and Air. Walk barefoot on the Earth whenever you can. Learn to swim, and return to the Sea from which all life originally came. And always wear as few clothes as possible. It is important to allow the Air to circulate freely around those parts of the body which are not usually exposed to it.
And don’t forget: it is no good working on your body if your mind is drugged with cigarettes and television.
Lance Tourney, Lad of Destiny: A Boy’s
Guide to Health and Confidence
Signs are, even to my drugged eye, that the village is finally coming out of winter. I am not witnessing a return to robustness and sanity exactly – that’s too much to expect down here, so far from the soundness of cities, so deep into the obsessional neurosis of Nature – but there is an atmosphere of fragile convalescence abroad, as if the patients have been allowed their first unaccompanied turn around the walled gardens of the institution.