Book Review: Looking for Mrs. Dextrose by Nick Griffiths

Now the comic novel is apparently back on track it seems a fashionably appropriate time to review one.  If there is only one thing to say about this book than that it is extremely British, & probably English as well.  A boy’s adventure story involving semi-orphan Pilsbury Dextrose & his newly found pseudo-adventurer, experienced liar & drunkarded father Harrison Dextrose.  It has travel & exploration of jungle countries, causal but precisely plotted murder, adolescent thirty-year-olds, a whole chapter on traffic wardens & their bureaucracies of ‘idiotism’, wordplay- but as a form of pathologic defense from consistent attacks of character failure & a plague of references that only sitcom aficionados & pop culture enthusiasts will truly understand, & possibly appreciate. 

Its heart is a British type of tragedy.  The inability for characters to mature, unable to be loved by mother, unable to be satisfied with father, is perfectly the substance public school fears tinted with a certain sort of nostalgia of what never was.  If only…if only…is the recurring yearning in Pilsbury’s search for the one thing that will make life perfect, if only mother was here, if only father would stop drinking.  Unable to make life perfect it has to make up for it by hiding the sentiment with irony, to smother the emotion through embarrassment & ‘nudge, nudge…’ jokes.  It ends being a comedy in spite of itself.  It ends with the brutal melancholy of a funeral.  Or that’s where it should have ended.  Instead it carries on like a ‘Carry On…’ inexplicably parodying One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with a mock James Bond teaser tagged on to boot.  Why these ending episodes were written is a wonder since they take time to build up before whipping out their substance, like cloth in a magic trick, with a punch line. 

To say that it falls flat would not be quite exact.  The jokes can work well & the characters are fleshed out enough to be alive that hands the plot a lively spontaneity.  However as a whole we have to speculate the importance of the journey in trying to look for Mrs. Dextrose.  In the end it feels a little glib & more than a little short of insight, which is a shame for its strengths are good.  If only it had one muscle more…

Fluidly written if a little filled with un-literary reference & cheap gags.  The clear sightedness of the narrator keeps every aspect balanced with chuckles in the treacherous sea-genre of the comic novel.  Although strangely not much dialogue about the weather for such a British book but that’s more of an uncharacteristic than a bad thing.  

Bear this in mind that it is the only book out of the trilogy that I have read & so there is a possible wider story arc to create a bridge of context out from it.  It’s the world’s first student-only edition, for us lucky lucky students, so try & make the most out of it before it smacks the mass market in May 2011- I know I have.