Dummy!

‘I am the man who abandoned Alan Bennett under a bus shelter in Armley,’ writes Jim Greenhalf in his new collection. It’s partly an instruction manual for dummies on how to hack out a kind of contentment in spite of the times, even if you have an inflated prostate and ‘a pig’s bladder of piss’ strapped to your leg. Dummy! is also a book about History. It’s a reverie of times passing – ‘when peace was love/and love was free for all/who could afford it’ – a howl of mockery, and a refusal to join in the triumphal march of post-Modernity. It’s a study in difficulty and dismay, and an attempt to praise the mutilated world in spite of all its disappointments.