Losing The Plot

by Philip Willey

BERT, a twice-divorced crab-fisherman, ARTHUR, a semi-retired knicker-sniffer, CHUCK a C.I.A. part-time novelist, and DANNY, a down to earth stoner, are thrown together in a world where losing the plot seems the only way to get by.

...Until, that is, a terrorist's bomb is planted in the freezer of their favorite fast-food joint...

This quirky tale of personal excess, failure, big-macs, aspirations, g-strings, and magic stirs our cast of eccentric characters around to combine a potent stew of combustible madness. LOSING THE PLOT is a post-modern meditation on the lives of four mildly deranged Westerners trying to make sense of their lives in an unknown land.

189 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[James Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

THERE ARE many forgettable books. There are some mediocre books. Then there are some books that have such an impact, you reread them, finding something new each time.

But wait.

Hold on.

There are some books, very few books that have such an impact that you remember the time and place and the circumstance you read the first few pages. Not many books fall into this category, but for me, Losing the Plot was one such book.

Time?

February 2005.

Place?

A three-bed-roomed semi, Kent.

Circumstance?

I’d returned from a two year stint in Thailand and was preparing to make the move back to the Kingdom for good. Part of the plan was to sell the three-bed-roomed house in Sevenoaks. I was twenty-seven, a foolish age to consider a life-long move to the Far East, but it made sense at the time and still does. In hindsight I was as mad as budgerigar pecking away on a slab of Moroccan black. Losing the Plot, indeed I was.

So the parcel arrived through DCO books (still in operation) and when the package arrived I tore it open and rushed upstairs to my favorite reading place: bed. The rest of the day was spent reading the novel, grinning, planning my next adventure. I had an instant fondness for the cast. Danny, the back-packer hedonist, Arthur – the closet knicker-sniffer, Bert the doomed sex tourist, and Chuck the tortured genius penning a novel in between stints in the red zone. Most of all I loved the humor and style which struck a chord of me being as I was and still am, a worshiper of Beat literature and all things quirky.

Fast forward to a year or two later I struck up an email correspondence with the author, a correspondence that has continued steadily and healthily to this day. I was thrilled to discover that the author had been around at the time my hero William Burroughs was in London in the sixties and had met the legend a couple of times. He even wrote a book about it. At last there was a link between Beat literature and Thailand. I later discovered another link in Christopher Moore’s relationship with late great beat publisher Barney Rossett, but that’s another story for another jazz bar.

The author of Losing the Plot is an artist. That is, he has little choice in what he creates. True artists are rarer than good lawyers in Bangkok. Many authors can learn grammar, plot, and promotion. Nobody can learn art. You are either born with it or you aren’t. Philip Willey is an artist through and through, an original thinker, and for that we should be thankful.

And I'm not just sayin that because I re-published it.