Product Description

This story uncovers suburbia's darkest secrets - mostly in The Flying Swan, a cosmic Rovers Return where Neville the barman and Archroy, owner of five magic beans, do battle with beasts of the occult and in particular the rather unpleasant Pope Alexander VI, the last of the Borgias.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27733 in Books
• Published on: 1992-02-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From the Back Cover
'Outside the sun shines. Buses rumble towards Ealing Broadway and I'm expected to do battle with the powers of darkness. It all seems a little unfair...'

You could say it all started with the red-eyed tramp with the slimy fingers who put the wind up Neville, the part-time barman, something rotten. Or when Archroy's wife swapped his trusty Morris Minor for five magic beans while he was out at the rubber factory.

On the other hand, you could say it all started a lot earlier. Like 450 years ago, when Borgias walked the earth.

Pooley and Omally, stars of the Brentford Laboiur Exchange and the Flying Swan, want nothing to do with it, especially if there's a Yankee and a pint of Large in the offing. Pope Alexander VI, last of the Borgias, has other ideas...

About the Author
Robert Rankin
Robert Rankin is the author of Web Site Story, Waiting for Godalming, Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls, Snuff Fiction, Apocalypso, The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag, Sprout Mask Replica, Nostradamus Ate My Hamster, A Dog Called Demolition, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived, The Greatest Show Off Earth, Raiders of the Lost Car Park, The Book of Ultimate Truths, the Armageddon quartet (three books), and the Brentford trilogy (five books) which are all published by Corgi Books. Robert Rankin's latest novel, The Fandom of the Operator, is now available as a Doubleday hardback.

Customer Reviews

Excellent humour. Brilliant characters.
Robert Rankin - brilliant as always. Follow the two drunken heros Pooley and Omally as they fight evil in the town of Brentford where the most important thing for everybody is to make easy money and cheat even your best friend into buying you beer.

The characters are the best part of the whole Brentford series. They all have strong personalities, and you get to know them well which makes it even funnier to read about their reactions in certain situations.

Also, Rankin changes between the subtle, the explicit, the beautiful and the outright vulgar. You never know what he throws at you next.

This one is a definite must read for everybody who appreciates humour and recognizes the subtle differences in the choice of words.

Persistently amusing.
This is one of my favorite books. It's the first of the Brentford series. I find the whole series to be comfortable, likable and highly amusing. It helps to have a taste for the surreal. I found the characters to be very likable. They have the care free attitudes of the characters from Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row, but they are intelligent and educated. They are not the type one would expect to be called upon to save the world. Essentially Brentford is the world. Should any character temporarily wander out of Brentford, Brentford would still be the reference point. The pub is the core essence of this world. Nothing is really serious unless it effects the pub. To this little world comes every silly notion that ever landed on the front page of the most bizarre tabloids. The Antipope is the place to start. It's one of the best, and will introduce you to the Brentford perspective. I found after reading a few pages, I wanted to take a break and wait for the smile on my face to ease up a little before I dared to proceed.

Making Normal Weird
The first book in the -arguably - five book series.

We follow the lives of a range of Brentonians over a period of time that their way of life is under threat from a power crazed lunatic. Between them they have a range of bizarre adventures, mostly just outside the law and all completely hilarious, in their quest to destroy this threat.

Throughout this book I got the sense that every character (save from the reincarnation of an evil power craved pope and his weird squat henchmen) was a normal person, with normal character traits. But the way in which Rankin manifests those traits in the story and the magic they create makes the characters much more than normal - eccentric, weird and lovable!

I think you have to concentrate at times to keep up with which character is who and what the hell they have been doing, but thats part of the fun! Ive started the second one!