The Contortionists Handbook

The Contortionist's Handbook
Craig Clevenger
(Fourth Estate)

Generally it's not worth paying much attention to those celebrity proclamations made on the covers of books. Every now and then, though, they're impossible to ignore. In the case of Craig Clevenger's debut novel The Contortionist's Handbook, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk, and Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly aren't wrong. The effusive praise they dole out is warranted.

Over the last few years there've been numerous books dealing with the psychological factors that contribute to drug addiction - Rick Moody's The Black Veil and James Frey's A Million Little Pieces amongst them. Although its protagonist is fictional, Handbook reflects Frey's shuddering memoir, John Dolan Vincent sharing the same nihilistic tendencies.

Vincent is a master forger, who like a chameleon changes his identity to escape some phantom of his existence. We find him in the wake of his sixth overdose in two years, detained for psychiatric assessment. Without giving too many of his manifold secrets away, he's engaged in a long-term game of snakes and ladders with the Department of Mental Health. This is purely a consequence of his ongoing problems, and his increasingly futile attempts to emasculate himself from them.

The multiple personalities Vincent has created are interwoven through The Contortionist's Handbook, gradually explaining the necessity of his predicament. His parries with the County Psychiatrist offer a perfect springboard for this, while also accounting for Richard Kelly's interest in making this book into a movie. Clevenger has woven an immensely intelligent - and sad - narrative around a premise that is deceptively simple.

Gavin Bertram