Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

Never before published in the United States, this brilliant and startlingly “American” novel presents a Yankee tycoon's explosive career paralleling the boom-and-bust twentieth century. By the American-educated English author of the justly famous novel I Hear Voices , Tornado Pratt was published originally only in Great Britain in 1977, where it was hailed by Anthony Burgess and Auberon Waugh, among others. The eponymous main character is not likely to win kudos for political correctness, since his story is something of a fictional cross between Hunter Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke, but there is something undeniably likeable, and forgiveable, about his larger-than-life persona. Tornado Pratt's narrative express train roars throughout, becoming of the premier novels told in first-person deranged.

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Paul Ableman was an English playwright and novelist. He wrote an eclectic mix of literary novels, erotic fiction, television novelizations, and non-fiction.

Ableman was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, into a Jewish family, and brought up mainly in New York. He later settled in Hampstead, London. His father was a tailor and his mother was a small-time actress.

Ableman was married twice, first to Tina Carrs-Brown in 1958; then to Sheila Hutton-Fox in 1978 until his death in 2006.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Ableman stopped writing original fiction in 1977, throwing himself instead into novelisations of British sitcoms and biographies of actors from British sitcoms. Across his brief career, Ableman wrote several loopy and inventive comic novels, blending styles and forms in the likes of I Hear Voices, Vac, and The Twilight of the Vilp, along with a book praising the wonders of oral sex (too saucy to even appear on Goodreads). This novel presents the autobiographical ramblings of the moribund titular, a loathsome all-American swindling egotist, whose achronological and unreliable accounts of past shags, successes, and slumps, come a-thundering in torrents of rude, rowdy comic prose. Finding this sort of vagabond hilarious or charming is trickier in the age of Trump, when the repulsiveness of this character type is more obvious than in 1977. Read as a satire on American amorality, Tornado Pratt is a pretty accurate scalping of the veneration of crooks, liars, and chancers that came to envelop the mighty land of the merkins.