The Bunker

 

For the sake of convenience, I've called The Bunker a found novel, because that's essentially what it is. I didn't write it, but I've spent the last couple of years transcribing the text from a series of monotonous cassette tapes - just under thirty-two hours of rambling testimony set down at a rate of five minutes per day. I did this because I've found something both fascinatingly banal and yet distractingly peculiar in the aforementioned testimony, and I had a hunch it might work as an admittedly lengthy piece of writing. Two years later, having completed this undertaking, I feel that The Bunker actually does hold together as a novel, both comic and tragic, not least for having been drawn from real life - if that which it describes can be called life of any sort.

My sales pitch thus far will most likely have raised more questions than it addresses, and I feel that most of the answers are best to be found by reading the book, because whatever I might say here will prove misleading. What I will say, however, is that I've put a lot of work into this thing, some of which has bordered on painful, so it's something I very much believe in as an artistic statement - which I state in the awareness of its potential audience being extremely limited. I've been thinking of it as James Joyce's Ulysses rewritten by Alan Bennett as an Alan Partridge vehicle. I'm not sure that this is necessarily a great description, but something in that direction.

If you're brave enough to buy a copy, then buy it here, keeping in mind that The Bunker is over six-hundred pages of not-entirely-linear narrative, incoherent sentence structure, mania, and slightly musty delusion and that the views expressed therein - many of which are unpleasantly strident - have often been formed without being based on any actual experience - which, for me, is part of the appeal of the book.

If you want to know what's wrong with absolutely fucking everything, you need to read The Bunker.