Doubled Up: Or My Life as the Back End of a Pantomime Horse

by T.J. Lustig

377 pages, Paperback

Published June 5, 1992

Reviews

[_inbetween_ · Rating 1 out of 5]

An incel having the Industrial Age happen to him. The language makes little sense for the unskilled character, so the bracketing of this being dictated to someone else, who is then said to change words and tone is one of the many failsafes built into this. Long before you stopped reading the increasing lists-of-things, the author says the story is just about everything being a lot of things. That could have been said in less words, as could everything else in here. There've been too many novels draped in the mantel "the circus", admittedly more recent, never managing to conjur up any magic; this book again plays it safe by mostly saying there isn't any magic, only to posit the circus as the opposite of "the city". But the second half of the book (at a time when you'd have liked it to finally end, or just did anything with various strands) then uses "colourful" Egypt, which has been used even more often, in various genres, ads nothing whatsoever ... basically, the carpenter's son lets the women he "loves" get sold into nightmarish marriage to her brother without moving a finger, making no attempt whatsoever, despite being able to run away with the front end of his pantomime horse (and not because he was wanking that guy off).
There's lashings of "perverse" sex, heaped on at the start to make an excuse for Jack being a passive incel, but brutally continuing till the end. I would like to just drily list the acts and constellations, but short descriptions would make them sound more interesting than they are. Also the villains are literally a murderous dwarf, and a guy named on the very first pages yet not "remembered" repeatedly by the protagonist.

tl;dr: even if you agree that everything just repeats itself meaninglessly, there are a lot of writers who make this bearable; this text is bending over backwards to make sure its weaknesses can't be critiqued, but it doesn't have any actual characters, nothing to care about, just misery porn (which it also meta pointed to in a contrived section about photography).