ONE HAND CLAPPING

Use both — this is apparently an entertainment Burgess wrote ten years ago under another name and who would suspect all that is going to happen after Howard Shirley with his photographic memory applies it to winning one thousand pounds on a TV quiz show and then to something short of a hundred thousand by summoning up the winners at the races. Until then Howard and Janet who tells this story have lived very ordinary lives — he works in a Used Car Mart, she works at the Supermarket, and they have been happy with their cup of tea and tinned kidney pudding. But they're no happier with all that "wicked money" can buy — it reminds Howard they've abused the ghosts of great men in the past — although he gives some of it away (to a poet with a certain attraction) and they try to have a desperately expensive good time. To go any further with Howard's photographic brain and sick mind would be another kind of betrayal — enjoy it for what it is — a right proper little fairy tale, a right improper little horror story, which altogether disarms.