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Overview: “John Lillibud, a struggling writer in London, becomes a successful inventor and marketer of novelties. One day a substance is brought to him that provides a kind of instant plastic surgery — a putty that molds itself to look like the flesh it is applied to. If left on too long it becomes permanent. This leads Lillibud to have an artificial nose created, to put on over his own, which he has always considered too small and crooked.
The mere wearing of the nose leads to the creation of a new personality: Richard Whittington, a strong self-confident author from Bloomsbury. He proceeds to recruit a French female personal secretary named Anna and installs her in the flat (keeping all this from Lillibud’s wife, Clarissa). Lillibud, which has become the successful brand name of his inventions, goes back and forth between these two personalities, which gradually become further and further divorced from each other.
Whittington writes The Man With the Crooked Nose, a roman a clef novel satirizing Lillibud, which leads to the threat of a lawsuit — against himself. One evening, a man named Strapkin (originally Strapotkin) comes to the Bloomsbury flat and tells Whittington that he is the Master Mind of a group of deaf-mutes living nearby who have organized themselves into a secret society called The Voice, which is telepathically broadcasting Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Their current project is to bring down the capitalist enterprise of Lillibud’s Novelties, Ltd. But Strapkin confesses that he himself is leading a hypocritical double life, having come to rely on the Lillibud cerebral vibrator. Further convolutions and duplicities ensue.
An intriguing novel, mingling psychological, occult and science fictional thrills with black comedy, very much of a piece with other offerings from this publisher in the 1930s, such as THE TORTURE GARDEN by Octave Mirbeau and TWISTED CLAY by Frank Walford. The modest starting point and straightforward style of the writing make a good foil for its increasingly fantastic story. The principal motif is that of the double, harkening back inevitably to Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde; but the image of the nose recalls Gogol’s surrealistic novella about a detachable nose; and the protagonist’s name, in conjunction with his status as a budding author, calls up the iconic image of Oscar Wilde holding a lily; Richard Whittington, a popular 15th century lord mayor of London, gave rise to Dick Whittington, a figure of English legend and pantomime. Stevenson’s tale has the apparent simplicity of a fable or allegory, whereas Hurrell’s has the arabesques of a faintly surreal extravaganza, spinning off doubles within doubles and duplicities within duplicities.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics Science Fiction, Occult, Psychological
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WorldCat OCLC: 5968478
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