What do you think?
Rate this book
Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer
Jonathan Fitch is distraught when his girfriend, Serafina, leaves him. He is so desperate that when the peculiar Mr Rinyo-Clacton offers him one million pounds but only one year to live, he agrees to the proposal. But what happened next was even more shocking.
182 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
1 person is currently reading
111 people want to read
About the author
Russell Hoban
183 books410 followersRussell Conwell Hoban was an American expatriate writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London, England, from 1969 until his death. (Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
January 29, 2014
One of the most cohesive and entertaining of Hoban’s novels of recycled tropes and obsessions, this 1998 effort places the Mephistophelean eccentric Mr. Rinyo-Clacton before another shambling beleaguered Hoban hero, dangling the prospect of one million pounds in Jonathan Finch’s heartsick face in exchange for his death in a year’s time. Having lost his life-love Serafina through his infidelities, he accepts the offer as a form of penitent sacrifice, intending to bequeath the cash to his lady so she can open her dream restaurant. In novels to follow, such as Her Name Was Lola, Hoban returns to the theme of an adulterous male fussing around his betrayed paramour, working in erudite references to artworks that seem to have scorched deep into his imagination and burned out any different things, and like that aforemensched novel, this one is abundant in humour, energy, and moments of tenderness that are often lacking when Hoban is all hyper.
Read
February 5, 2020An infidelite (I made up that word but it should exist) sells his death to a sadistic billionaire. Weird! Dark! Obscene and disturbing! Like Ian McEwan if Ian McEwan didn't suck!
June 27, 2015
Russell Hoban is best known today for ‘Riddley Walker’, a wonderfully strange and quite unique post-apocalyptic novel set in the very distant aftermath of a nuclear war where society has rebuilt itself along medieval lines. It’s written in a rich and dense mixed-up argot, an invented punning language along the lines of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or perhaps even ‘Finnegans Wake’. But the author’s other work is less well known, perhaps because it is (at first glance) less superficially unusual.
He was an artist and illustrator, and later took to writing books for children, and novels such as this, which is one in a kind of loose continuum of books he wrote set in and around London. Other similar examples I’ve read and enjoyed include ‘Turtle Diary’, ‘The Bat Tattoo’, ‘Kleinzeit’, and ‘Amaryllis Night and Day’ — all seem to exist within the same psychic universe of delicious concrete detail juxtaposed with weird plots and gentle rumination on art, philosophy, literature and music. Pretty much all the points I’m about to make could also be applied to those books too. I have a great deal of affection for them. They have a style which is basically realistic, and on a line-by-line basis the writing is relatively conventional, but in their own way they are every bit as idiosyncratic as ‘Riddley Walker’.
All of the author’s novels were generally well-received, but in that polite and somewhat distant way that British literary periodicals treat writers who are respected but not necessarily treated as great artists. ‘Turtle Diary’ was even made into a movie, scripted by no less than Harold Pinter, but it still seems to me that we’ve never known quite what to do with this author. I think he is deeply underrated. His work belongs firmly to the genre of itself, and to describe it in précis is to cut out everything about it that’s interesting: the flow of a text that’s constantly working over itself, as if the thinking and dreaming and writing had occurred simultaneously on the page. And yet the style is so restrained, the lines and paragraphs clipped very short, like a garden made up of fine hedges trimmed into wild shapes — many of his chapters are only one or two pages long — and he has a poet’s ear for the sound of words and the rhythm of imagery.
There’s something very appealing about the way that London is described here. As a lifelong resident of that city, I find his accounts of it have a certain atmosphere which is so familiar to me it's almost cosy. The author, an American, settled here in the middle of his life, and he takes great pleasure here in listing certain places and street names, and in particular the structure of the London Underground system, even down to the layout of certain train platforms and their specific ambience. There’s no gawping at the usual landmarks, no fetishisation of the double-decker bus or the black cabs — only a quiet appreciation of the best the city has to offer. Though the protagonist frequently visits notable galleries, museums and concert halls, it is only as a means to an end: certain paintings, sculptures and songs possess a totemic significance to him. There’s a great importance placed here on the individual’s experience with a particular work of art, and how we can both find ourselves in the context in which that art was created, but also how we fill the unknown space around those works with the crazy marginalia of our own lives.
This particular book tells the story of a young man, Jonathan Fitch, who finds himself sitting alone in Piccadilly Circus station one evening when he is propositioned by a very wealthy man — the Mr Rinyo-Clacton of the title. He takes Jonathan to the opera, gets him very drunk on champagne, and later they have sex. Later there comes the offer of the title: Jonathan will receive a million pounds cash if he signs a contract that says that he’ll die in one year’s time, and that Mr Rinyo-Clacton will be absolved of all responsibility. It’s a Faustian pact of sorts, then, though the money itself becomes a sort of McGuffin in terms of the actual plot. Jonathan doesn’t do much with the cash except use it to live on, and so the story becomes more about his pursuit of his old girlfriend Serafina, whose loss caused him to be sitting alone in the tube station in the first place.
But there’s also the problem that shortly after sleeping with Rinyo-Clacton, Jonathan becomes convinced that he might have caught HIV/AIDS from the older man, and that this might somehow end up being the cause of his eventual death. This aspect doesn’t feel entirely at home in the book, and it's treated with a breeziness that I occasionally found uncomfortable — it isn’t funny or clever to have one character describe gay sex as ‘arse roulette’, for example — and the book doesn’t really have the space nor the inclination to seriously consider the full implications of its own suggestions here. The core of what makes the story interesting is in the peculiar relationship between Jonathan, Serafina, Katarina and Rinyo-Clacton, and in this context the threat of that terrible disease feels more like an occasional distraction between sessions of moderate emotional drama.
The book also has a slightly saggy mid-section, with a lot of dialogue where it feels like very little is actually happening; but aside from this, I enjoyed it very much. I hope to continue my current pattern of buying one of this author’s books whenever I stumble upon it in a quiet second-hand bookshop somewhere because if ever an author was worth collecting, I think it would probably be Russell Hoban.
He was an artist and illustrator, and later took to writing books for children, and novels such as this, which is one in a kind of loose continuum of books he wrote set in and around London. Other similar examples I’ve read and enjoyed include ‘Turtle Diary’, ‘The Bat Tattoo’, ‘Kleinzeit’, and ‘Amaryllis Night and Day’ — all seem to exist within the same psychic universe of delicious concrete detail juxtaposed with weird plots and gentle rumination on art, philosophy, literature and music. Pretty much all the points I’m about to make could also be applied to those books too. I have a great deal of affection for them. They have a style which is basically realistic, and on a line-by-line basis the writing is relatively conventional, but in their own way they are every bit as idiosyncratic as ‘Riddley Walker’.
All of the author’s novels were generally well-received, but in that polite and somewhat distant way that British literary periodicals treat writers who are respected but not necessarily treated as great artists. ‘Turtle Diary’ was even made into a movie, scripted by no less than Harold Pinter, but it still seems to me that we’ve never known quite what to do with this author. I think he is deeply underrated. His work belongs firmly to the genre of itself, and to describe it in précis is to cut out everything about it that’s interesting: the flow of a text that’s constantly working over itself, as if the thinking and dreaming and writing had occurred simultaneously on the page. And yet the style is so restrained, the lines and paragraphs clipped very short, like a garden made up of fine hedges trimmed into wild shapes — many of his chapters are only one or two pages long — and he has a poet’s ear for the sound of words and the rhythm of imagery.
There’s something very appealing about the way that London is described here. As a lifelong resident of that city, I find his accounts of it have a certain atmosphere which is so familiar to me it's almost cosy. The author, an American, settled here in the middle of his life, and he takes great pleasure here in listing certain places and street names, and in particular the structure of the London Underground system, even down to the layout of certain train platforms and their specific ambience. There’s no gawping at the usual landmarks, no fetishisation of the double-decker bus or the black cabs — only a quiet appreciation of the best the city has to offer. Though the protagonist frequently visits notable galleries, museums and concert halls, it is only as a means to an end: certain paintings, sculptures and songs possess a totemic significance to him. There’s a great importance placed here on the individual’s experience with a particular work of art, and how we can both find ourselves in the context in which that art was created, but also how we fill the unknown space around those works with the crazy marginalia of our own lives.
This particular book tells the story of a young man, Jonathan Fitch, who finds himself sitting alone in Piccadilly Circus station one evening when he is propositioned by a very wealthy man — the Mr Rinyo-Clacton of the title. He takes Jonathan to the opera, gets him very drunk on champagne, and later they have sex. Later there comes the offer of the title: Jonathan will receive a million pounds cash if he signs a contract that says that he’ll die in one year’s time, and that Mr Rinyo-Clacton will be absolved of all responsibility. It’s a Faustian pact of sorts, then, though the money itself becomes a sort of McGuffin in terms of the actual plot. Jonathan doesn’t do much with the cash except use it to live on, and so the story becomes more about his pursuit of his old girlfriend Serafina, whose loss caused him to be sitting alone in the tube station in the first place.
But there’s also the problem that shortly after sleeping with Rinyo-Clacton, Jonathan becomes convinced that he might have caught HIV/AIDS from the older man, and that this might somehow end up being the cause of his eventual death. This aspect doesn’t feel entirely at home in the book, and it's treated with a breeziness that I occasionally found uncomfortable — it isn’t funny or clever to have one character describe gay sex as ‘arse roulette’, for example — and the book doesn’t really have the space nor the inclination to seriously consider the full implications of its own suggestions here. The core of what makes the story interesting is in the peculiar relationship between Jonathan, Serafina, Katarina and Rinyo-Clacton, and in this context the threat of that terrible disease feels more like an occasional distraction between sessions of moderate emotional drama.
The book also has a slightly saggy mid-section, with a lot of dialogue where it feels like very little is actually happening; but aside from this, I enjoyed it very much. I hope to continue my current pattern of buying one of this author’s books whenever I stumble upon it in a quiet second-hand bookshop somewhere because if ever an author was worth collecting, I think it would probably be Russell Hoban.
December 26, 2015
Mr rinyo clacton is an enigma. A mysterious millionaire with (seemingly) a made up name. He takes an interest in a loser who has a dead end job he hates and has just split up with his girlfriend.
Caught at a low ebb jonathan fitch agrees to sell his death to rinyo clacton in return for a million pounds and a year in which to enjoy it.
What follows is a roller coaster ride. Is rinyo clacton a sinister bully with a god complex or just a lonely old lecher living under his own death sentence (the book was written in 1998 and AIDS is a recurrent theme).
Funny thought provoking and immensely enjoyable. A couple of plot twists that had me reeling. Hoban is a great author and this is well worth a read.
Caught at a low ebb jonathan fitch agrees to sell his death to rinyo clacton in return for a million pounds and a year in which to enjoy it.
What follows is a roller coaster ride. Is rinyo clacton a sinister bully with a god complex or just a lonely old lecher living under his own death sentence (the book was written in 1998 and AIDS is a recurrent theme).
Funny thought provoking and immensely enjoyable. A couple of plot twists that had me reeling. Hoban is a great author and this is well worth a read.
December 2, 2008
Yes I enjoyed this, one of Hoban's later novels. A faustian pact - a man can enjoy riches as long as he agrees to be murdered next year...
Maybe not quite satisfying enough, but puzzling, poetic, beautifully written..
Maybe not quite satisfying enough, but puzzling, poetic, beautifully written..
December 13, 2024
Decent enough mystery from Hoban, not as headspinning as some of his others. Nice set up w the eponymous antagonist, v authentic depictions of 90s London, tempting depictions of music (lm putting together a playlist). Pay off feels rushed and slightly disappointing, almost as though he got tired of seeing a chilling idea through. The holocaust epilogue seems crowbarred in, which should never be the case, really..
November 23, 2024
Must say, I hope Mr Hoban got where he wanted to get with this novel (besides fulfilling the contractual obligations, obviously), but it certainly doesn't look that way. Unless it's all an overblown rumination on the hollowness of Modern Life (TM), which would in itself be an ironic case in point. Pretty well written on the fundamental level, though, so marks for that.
December 26, 2024
4 Stars.
A classic Hoban romp. Stylistically he might be one of my most enjoyed authors at the moment. If someone broke Vonnegut's heart, stuck him in London, made him eat several tomes of classical paintings and history, gave him a half-drunk bottle of gin, you'd get Russell Hoban.
More to this review later.
A classic Hoban romp. Stylistically he might be one of my most enjoyed authors at the moment. If someone broke Vonnegut's heart, stuck him in London, made him eat several tomes of classical paintings and history, gave him a half-drunk bottle of gin, you'd get Russell Hoban.
More to this review later.
February 27, 2016
This is the second book I've read by this author and really liked it. It's written with great imagination and wit and as for Mr Rinyo Clacton what a fantastic character to dream up. Whilst reading this i was trying to imagine how it was going to all end up, but never thought of that combination. I even said to my wife out loud I never saw that coming. I feel the need to seek out more Russell Hoban books now I think.
January 12, 2021
Hoban flexes his writing prowess with a plot that will have you wondering "what would I do?". The story is disturbing, dark, and entertaining. Sadly, the ending fails to deliver to the promise of the first chapters and it is memorable nonetheless.
March 29, 2021
An astonishing book, so bad, yet so good. An offer you can't refuse, give you one guess what it is... Can't decide? There's the rub. Classic Hoban, the jinks are so high in this fable that you'll get vertigo. Just go with it, well you would wouldn't you...?
August 8, 2021
Bit disappointed by the ending; I don’t know if acknowledging a deus ex machina in the text makes it any less of an underwhelming choice. I did enjoy the rest of it though so it’s a (feeling generous) four stars.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 12, 2023
The premise is more interesting than the story itself. It could have delved into more interesting philosophies than it did.
Serefina staying with Jonathon in the end irks me greatly. Despite this it was fast paced and enjoyable and not at all sensible or predictable.
Serefina staying with Jonathon in the end irks me greatly. Despite this it was fast paced and enjoyable and not at all sensible or predictable.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 14, 2011
Now we have 2 copies!
February 11, 2012
Just finished it; an excellent read. Like all of Hoban's work, it is very well crafted. No detail is an accident; everything has meaning and is interlocking.
October 8, 2016
I got that Mr. Hoban had extensive knowledge of multiple languages, art, music, history, books, words, worods, woordos, whatever you can imagine.
Other than those, I got nothing.
Other than those, I got nothing.
July 19, 2021
Twisty turny, dark, loved it
December 24, 2021
Things don't end, they just accumulate.
October 28, 2022
Woordos
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews