All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles review – biting humour

Henry, the middle-aged narrator of Mark Bowles’s debut novel, is ensconced in a Soho cafe, trying to write a memoir about his late father. To his considerable irritation, a digital entrepreneur at a nearby table is prattling loudly into his phone about his startup and his recent travels in the far east, while deploying inordinate amounts of business speak. (When he begins one sentence with “As per yourself,” we can place the type exactly.) Distracted from his task, Henry’s mind wanders, brooding on, among other things, mass tourism in the Instagram age (“The flattening of the world to wallpaper for the grinning head”), the marketisation of education and the perniciousness of corporate jargon. We remain inside his head for most of the next 200-odd pages, intermittently checking back in with the voluble tech bro, who embodies everything Henry hates about the 21st century; his animus builds to almost psychotic proportions as the novel progresses.

The sociological ruminations soon give way to a personal narrative. We learn that Henry hails from Bradford, attended Oxford University and, after a decade in a soul-crushing telesales job, completed a philosophy doctorate to become an academic. A self-styled autodidact, he once resolved to learn about the great composers by listening to them in alphabetical order. (“I did not get very far … today I listen almost exclusively to Bach, Bartók and Beethoven”.) Because of his working-class background, he suffered from impostor syndrome; his assimilation into academia was “a trajectory of imitation and rebuff, of overzealous imitation compensating for prior exclusion”. There is indeed a hint of affectation in the narrator’s slightly mannered prose style: he is fond of “whilst” and “wherein”, and prone to the occasional throwback sentence structure (“I … opened ever so gently the window”). Fully conscious of this, he quips: “I wore my learning, such as it was, like a trench coat on a summer’s day.”

Henry’s humour, oscillating between candid self-deprecation and sardonic misanthropy, keeps the reader on side. At various points, his meandering consciousness revels in the nuances of language: he muses on posh people’s fondness for the word “copious”, the paradoxical ugliness of “pulchritude” and the inherently sad timbre of the Brummie accent, “wherein one hears only the murmur of diurnal disappointment, and which, defined by bathos and anticlimax, is quintessentially English”. We eventually circle back to Henry’s childhood, via a heart-rending anecdote about a school bully who once forced a fellow pupil to eat faeces. Henry’s father had been an aloof and domineering figure, but in his latter years, “pockets of eccentricity and kindness were opened”, and a tentative camaraderie developed between them: “the two of us, sat side by side, each opened the door of our solitude to the other”.

All My Precious Madness is an astutely observed portrait of intellectual melancholia. We tend to associate nostalgia with reactionary politics, but it can, of course, take other forms too: with his blend of sweary, disaffected rage and leftwing idealism, the narrator’s sensibility recalls the US comic Bill Hicks. Henry is down on England and Englishness, which he identifies with parochial conservatism, and romanticises Paris and Rome. For him, the humble espresso symbolises a world of possibility. “There is,” he declares, “every reason to live in Old Europe at the point of its demise and disappearance, rather than sniffing after the Zeitgeist, which is made of cables and clouds, brands and fragile exoskeletons amalgamated from images.”

It’s hard to disentangle these somewhat sweeping sentiments from the narrator’s class-based ennui. Henry’s fetishistic passion for “Old Europe” originates in his yearning to transcend the cultural horizons of his upbringing in the monochrome landscape of 1980s England. Seen in this light, his chuntering fixation on the tech bro – and the vulgar, Thatcherite aspiration he represents – feels like a projection. Perhaps the charmless bore who blathers on about his frolics in the global south isn’t really all that different from the intellectual bon vivant, who is no less of a tourist just because he knows his Sartre from his Lacan. They may inhabit very different moral and aesthetic realms, but they have in common a restless drive: to reinvent themselves, to evolve and escape – by whatever means necessary.

• All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles is published by Galley Beggar (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.