Böcker av Pat Gray

Pat Gray's Kafkaesque fantasy presents a bureaucratic landscape which is both sinister and comic. Mr Narrator leads an obscure neo-colonial existence in Goughly, where he is an export agent for a firm of Rotherham engineers and shares a flat and a mistress with Murphy, a post-modernist writer. An upset to one of his business deals plunges him into a bizarre cross-desert journey to the capital, where, social, political and sexual humiliation descend on him in ever increasing number. Pat Gray's novel portrays with documentary accuracy a Morocco which has never existed but one which has now been colonised by surrealism

A welcome return for Pat Gray's classic tale of friendship between the Cat, Mouse and Rat. The Cat finds himself abandoned without food in an unfurnished house. At first he consorts with his old friends, Mouse and Rat; the one addicted to cheese and philosophy, the other to flashy Italian suits and style, but gradually the Cat gives way to his normal cat-like urges. At first guilty, then elated at his new freedom, and the beneficial impact this has on the other residents, the Cat falls prey to a new and troubling vision of how the house might be, with more initiative and enterprise, and more discipline for the likes of Mouse and Rat. Gradually the Cat unleashes new forces on the house and the gardens beyond, achieving ever greater things, except that, as he does so, he finds himself more and more alone.

This book presents case studies of recent and often spectacular failures of policy including the BSE crisis, the 'Arms to Iraq' affair, the German currency union, and asks what is meant by policy 'disaster'.