Beauman

My earliest reading memoryUnfortunately my memory for this kind of thing is a complete blank, so I’ve decided to manufacture an incident where my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow had to be confiscated from me at preschool because I was having too many insights about it.My favourite book growing upI devoured The Colour of Magic and at least 20 other Terry Pratchett novels as a child and consequently have never got over the feeling that there’s something pretty fundamental missing from nearly all “grown-up”…

Ned Beauman was listed on Granta’s once-a-decade list of best young British novelists last time out, in 2013, and his latest novel makes clear that, not yet 40, he’s absolutely worth a nomination next year too. Full of fun and big ideas, his conceptually tricksy novels crackle with comic zip, alive to the past (his debut, Boxer, Beetle, and second novel, The Teleportation Accident, dealt in different ways with the legacies of Nazism) as well as the present (his third novel, Glow, was an ultra-contemporary conspiracy…

In a somewhat more nerdy and blokeish literary culture, Ned Beauman would probably be more famous. It’s easy to imagine the four precision-engineered, shaggy-dog thriller-comedies that he published between 2010 and 2017 going down a treat in, say, the 60s or 70s. But in the 2020s, the vast majority of literary fiction is, as we are frequently reminded, bought (and, increasingly, written) by women; and there is something fundamentally boyish about Beauman’s novels that puts him, I suspect, out of step with prevailing…