The Tick Of Tender Madness

"This is not an easy read" says the voice at the commencement of this book, and in the tradition of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, this experimental novel lives up to this honest and fair warning. It would seem that Gest lives inside his own head, often able only to express his thoughts in the free-verse and dense prose gleaned from the library of books around him. Through disjointed prose, sometimes poetical, sometimes impenetrable, his dialogue hovers between lucidity and a kind of mania, taking us on a first-person journey through schizophrenia and the agonies of unrequited love. Other voices too begin to filter through. And then there is the small matter of a brutal, but incidental, murder.