On the Run with Mary

A boy and his talking dog are off on a frenzied quest for safety and succor in Barrow’s dementedly cheerful, comically lewd, consistently scatological picaresque, set in and around a London—a place where nobody’s safe from absurd attacks, molestation, and general indignity. The narrator, a young man escaping from his boarding school and its sadistic headmaster, encounters “a dachshund nosing at my ankles” named Mary at Euston Station. The duo then careens from a strip club where the performers do “unprintable things with a hedgehog and two slugs,” to a jailhouse, to a “Home for Imbeciles,” where the deceased are buried “up to the waist in concrete,” this method being “cheap, easy, and entertaining.” Having gone to Mary’s estranged mother for help and found her corpse in bed at the Dogs’ Home, the pair continue adventuring through “one of London’s main sewers,” awash in waste and giant rats. Topside, the city’s just as filthy: a taxi driver uses his own vehicle as a latrine, acts of bestiality are commonplace, and strange men are forever making advances toward the narrator; his monogamous heterosexual partner turns out to be wielding a “polythene ‘screw-on.’ ” A rollicking catalogue of sex, violence, and acts of cartoonish cruelty, Barrow’s novel is a schoolboy’s happy nightmare writ large; readers may find it impossible to look away. (Nov.)