Could the future for Jay Mason, a 30-something deacon,attached to a closing Anglican church in Geneva, lie in the relic business? Or might the bones of his heroes, from Calvin to Chaplin, Beckett to Borges, have an expected effect? This is a VERY funny book with a very serious message - read it and enjoy both.
I had no visa for England, no passport, and the scandal was: they let me in.
I walked straight in, looking dreadful from lack of sleep, obvious in my clerical collar, carrying two bin-bags of assorted bones. I knew the secret. They let me in because I was a recognisable English type: over-educated, disorientated, ineffectual. I had the patterned background of my many years at choir-school, and a character battered by an education ideal for life on another planet. Such as nineteenth-century India.
They waved me in. They said: Come on in James, we know your weak-kneed choir-school sort, and have nothing to fear from the likes of you. Welcome.
