Chasing the dream

'The Perfect Fool', published in 2001, is comedian / journalist / "opera director" Stewart Lee's first and to date only novel.

The book recounts the adventures of a disparate group of oddballs and fuck-ups which includes: two lazy wasters from a Dire Straits covers band; a whacked-out hippie with an obsessive-compulsive disorder that makes him search endlessly down the backs of seats for cigarette butts; a bloke with no memory but who's convinced he used to be an astronaut; and a woman trying to escape her past, having indulged in an activity not fit for publication on a family website like SWSL.

The first half is set, for the most part, in Lee's London - a scruffy and grim urban jungle - and the second in the flat expanses of the Arizona desert, where all but one of the central characters meet up and join forces, each pursuing their own dream or quest. The action is complicated by the fact that one of the characters is himself being pursued by the shadowy Hampstead Man.

Though not as laugh-out-loud funny as I'd anticipated, and with an ending which is too neatly resolved, 'The Perfect Fool' is an enjoyable enough yarn featuring some memorable caricatures, as well as being a serious meditation about belief and the lengths to which it can drive people.