Homage to the unknown novel

The book The __________________ of __________________ is a Dickensian fable set in a sprawling Orwellian Britain, told in a portentuous Tolstovian manner and laced with characteristic Dostoyevskian moral ambiguities. The rumbustious plot is positively Shakespearian, bursting at the seams with Voltairean caricatures and superbly-executed Fieldingesque allegories. In essence, it concerns a Joycean and an Austenophile who secretly fall in love with one another while at a Keatsian party of Old Wodehousians. They are tortured by the need to keep their epic, nay, Byronesque love from their fellow Wodehousians, and unaware of each others secret love from one another, the novel takes a sudden, Mercurial/Freudian turn. Wildean bon mots abound, and the centre of the novel is framed by a grandly elegant Spenserian structure, and interlaced with a coruscatingly bawdy plot worthy of Moliere or Chaucer. The sudden diversions into war-torn France give the novel a grand, Homeresque scheme, and the concluding chapters, in which the plot is tied up in an acerbically Popesque style, have a quiet force to them, positively Shelleyean.

All in all, this book can be summed up as a Chestertonian fable, a la Thurber, quasi Perelmanian, and the ne plus ultra of the Faulkneresque. It is a bestseller worthy of King, Brown, Rowling, and Bryson, with a strong dose of Amis/Waugh (Evelyn, not Auberon)/Aldiss/Moorcock/Asimov/Blish/Stapledon, not to mention Tolkien (and we had probably better not.)

It is twenty-eight dollars more than you would consider paying, and one thousand four hundred and thirty-three pages more than you would bother reading. It has been met with wide critical acclaim, all of which can be found on the inside back cover of the book. It can be found in your local bookstore for the next sixty years.

It is, in a word, cabalistic.