Absent Without Leaving

ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVING

Every Tuesday, Rufus Manning reports to the Job Centre with a diary full of jobs he never applied for, interviews he never attended, and an adviser who believes every word of it.

Every other day belongs to someone else.

Alone on the twenty-first floor of a crumbling tower block, Rufus has built a world to survive in: Earl Grey becomes an uninvited aristocratic guest. His mouldering chair becomes Charlie, a coward and deserter. His goldfish Goldie becomes confidante, monarch and audience. Rufus has very little furniture and almost no company, so he manufactures both. It's a comfortable enough delusion, right up until the rent's owed, the drink runs low, and his creditors come looking for what they are owed.

That's when the war starts.

Rufus wrote a novel once - rejected, unpublished, buried - about a mutinous officer called Colonel Manning, a man who abandoned his post and started a war of his own design. Nobody read it. Nobody was supposed to.

But somewhere between the drink, the debt, and the endless grey Tuesdays, the Colonel takes command of his waking life. The result: destruction, usually.

ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVING is a blackly comic, increasingly unhinged descent through unemployment, alcohol, invented enemies and real ones - a novel that never quite lets you decide where the joke ends and the breakdown begins. By the time Rufus can no longer tell which name is really his, neither can you.

Some wars are fought for a cause. This one is fought because there was nothing left to lose.