The actor Paul Hilton brilliantly inhabits the character of a ranting working-class academic in this debut novel
S
ome books feel so suited to the audio format that they could have been written with the voice in mind. All My Precious Madness is one of those. Mark Bowles’s debut novel, which won the audiobook fiction category at the inaugural British Audio awards (where, full disclosure, I was a judge), is a deliciously sweary monologue from a middle-aged malcontent.
A sideways reflection on working-class identity and masculinity, the novel gives voice to Henry Nash, a man of little patience. Sitting in a London coffee shop and trying to write a monograph of his father, he rains judgment on the other patrons whose obnoxious phone calls he can’t help but overhear. An Oxford graduate turned writer and academic, Nash lives in a Soho flat where he has been known to furtively drop eggs on passersby who disturb him with their drunken racket.
Along with rants about business jargon and city hipsters, he recalls scenes from his working-class childhood in Bradford and his university days, where he struggled to fit in with his public school-educated peers and “where I wore my learning, such as it was, like a trenchcoat on a summer’s day”. But since then, Henry has grown comfortable with academia and decries the anti-intellectual English, “who hate anything which doesn’t return them to the prosaic and the everyday”.
