My friend, Alistair, has reviewed Rowan Dean’s first novel, Corkscrewed. I wonder often about the antics of you humans and this book certainly describes some exceptional escapades of the human race.

I include this review to further my readers’ understanding of the then prevailing Zeitgeist which they will know is the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.

(The Zoo understands that Alistair’s review is the first.)

 

 

 

                                                           REVIEW OF CORKSCREWED

 

A study of life in the advertising world of London in The Eighties, Corkscrewed, a ‘Confabulation’, by Rowan Dean, is the laugh that you need to kick-start your life into 2018.

Rowan Dean is the man who gave the world the Paul Hogan Fosters’ advertisements—said to have led to Crocodile Dundee—and the Hamlet Photobooth advertisement  acclaimed as ‘The Advertisement of The Century’  by a special jury at Cannes in 1997.

A Warning! This novel is not recommended for the unsophisticated or squeamish.

Corkscrewed  wrenched me from my tranquil moorings in rural New South Wales back into that crazy mixed-up world I knew as home in my youth. In my case it was the London of The Sixties.

The reader is treated to descriptions of decadent London restaurants such as Quaglinos (where I attended world Champion racing driver, Graham Hill’s welcome back party after his 1969 Watkins Glen crash) and Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Bing Crosby’s preferred restaurant, Kettners of Soho.

In the politically incorrect world of The Eighties staff were useful nobodies:

 

• ‘Tinkerbell’ the loyal secretary in Corkscrewed  was to be fired because she also thought of the idea for “Photobooth”: ‘We can’t have Tinkerbell telling everyone it was her We’d look ridiculous’ (page 20).
• In The Sixties, a good friend in the publishing business had a target fixed to a wall in his office at which he used to shoot his air-gun. The target was adjacent to his secretary’s head and the bullets would whizz past terrifying her.

 

 Corkscrewed  sees dead drunk ‘Creatives’ buying Porsches. I recall a friend, also dead drunk, being carried in to a light aircraft sales office by his pals and persuaded to sign a cheque for a thirty thousand pound aeroplane whilst still comatose.

 

 

 

 

 

The two Advertising ‘Creatives’ enjoy never-ending boozy lunches at their long-suffering clients’ expense. The same titled gentleman who bought the aeroplane incessantly asked us to lunch and plied us with ‘red ink’. (He had to buy newspapers to know what day it was because he was so wealthy that he would only end up with sixpence in every pound after tax if he worked.)

The scene switches from London to New York to the Italian Alps via Venice and back to London charting more hilarious drunken escapades including an accidental lunch with the Prime Minister of Italy.

The book is interwoven with smart repartee, typical of the Eighties and the Sixties amongst the ultra-competitive and cut-throat advertising fraternity:

• “Where do you think they shot THE ITALIAN JOB?  In bloody Dorset?” (page 186).
•  “This is why we are here!  Not for the bloody mountains and the freezing frigging arctic gales! Not for some poxy highlight in the actor’s lice infested hair! Not so we can see his bloodshot dope-ridden eyeballs!” (page 247).

Is that how we really behaved? And this is quite a mild selection!

The two protagonists were indeed ‘kings of the world’ as the penultimate chapter proves.

It says much for Rowan’s genius that he can embrace life as a comic novelist and yet be able to critique the current political situation with, at times, passionate intensity, with the equally brilliantly loquacious Ross Cameron on ‘The Outsiders’ and as the editor of The Australian Spectator.

 

ALISTAIR 

 All we chimpanzees enjoyed Corkscrewed and our friend, Alistair’s review. Reading the novel has indeed kick-started us into 2018.

Happy New Year to All!

Chugley The Thoroughly Entertained Chimpanzee

Gibber! Gibber!

To order contact Wilkinson Publishing, Melbourne:

www.wilkinsonpublishing.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=558