Mark Bowles’s striking debut explores working-class identity, masculinity and alienation. Like the author, Bowles’s narrator Henry Nash grew up in West Yorkshire and studied at Oxford, where he wore his learning “like a trench coat on a summer’s day” and struggled to fit in with his peers. Now he teaches in London, writes books and dreams of escaping the “anti-intellectual” English who “hate anything which doesn’t return them to the prosaic and the everyday”. Instead, he divides his time between London, Paris and Rome, “spending 50 weeks in the former and two in the others”.
All My Precious Madness is written as a monologue. Henry rails against a world dedicated to the pursuit of money. He directs his anger at the digital consultant he nicknames Cahun (after the French surrealist), who frequents the same Soho cafe and destroys Henry’s peaceful contemplation with his loud sales patter and inane chat on his phone. He reminds Henry of the decade he spent working in the “moral wasteland” of a telesales company.
Circling around the act of violence that defines the novel, Henry reflects on his childhood, a “world of gas fires and slices of white bread with pink jam, and ashtrays and endless cups of weak tea”, the school bully, and his relationship with his father who beat him and suffered a breakdown later in life. Henry’s own unspooling, while studying for his doctorate, helps him better understand the parent who “caged his emotions and often exploded in rage”.
Henry’s introspective tone veers between humour and fury as he articulates what many of us think but don’t say. Threaded through his polemic against narcissism, small-mindedness and mean-spiritedness are moments of joy at life’s simple pleasures: “a pungent espresso in a thick white cup” or “mist like cold steam rising from the earth”. The book is also a poignant meditation on a son’s love for his father, the desire for human connection, and the consolations of poetry, which help calm Henry’s “inner volcano” and bolster him against despair.
All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles is published by Galley Beggar Press (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
