Bob Mortimer has no business writing a novel this good.
I mean that as a compliment. Here's a comedian who trained as a solicitor, became famous for surrealist sketch comedy, and then at sixty-something decides to write a noirish mystery about a forgettable legal assistant named Gary Thorn who falls for a girl in a pub and can't even remember her name. The premise sounds like something a student would pitch me in creative writing class - vague, meandering, held together by vibes. But Mortimer pulls it off because his brain works differently than most people's, and the audiobook is where you really get to live inside that brain.
I was listening during one of those Saturday morning lakefront walks with Denise - early enough that the joggers hadn't taken over yet, the lake flat and gray - and I actually stopped walking at one point because Gary described something so oddly specific that I needed to rewind. This is a book where a character's attractiveness gets compared to food in ways that shouldn't work but absolutely do. Gary's voice - Mortimer's voice, really - has this quality of being simultaneously deadpan and wildly imaginative, like he's narrating the most boring day of his life while secretly living in a Terry Gilliam film.
The Beautiful Problem of Having Bob Mortimer Read His Own Words
Here's where I need to be honest with you. The narration is rough. Not rough like "needs polish" rough - rough like "you can hear the man breathing" rough. There are stumbles that didn't get edited out. The recording quality shifts between sections. If you're someone who listens to a lot of professionally produced audiobooks, the first thirty minutes will feel like switching from a Criterion Collection Blu-ray to someone's iPhone footage.
But - and this is a significant but - once you settle in, you realize that Mortimer's imperfect delivery IS the character. Gary Thorn is supposed to be unremarkable. He's supposed to stumble. The slight hesitations, the way Mortimer leans into certain absurd phrases with just the faintest hint of a smile in his voice, that's not something a professional narrator could replicate. When Gary goes on one of his surreal tangents about pie shops or creates elaborate internal monologues about people he barely knows, Mortimer reads them with the casual confidence of a man who genuinely thinks this way. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation - even when some of those pauses are probably just Mortimer losing his place.
Sally Phillips handles the female perspective sections, and the dual narration works well. She brings a different energy - cleaner, more pointed - that keeps the audiobook from becoming a one-note Bob Mortimer comedy special.
Gary Thorn Is the Protagonist My Students Would Actually Relate To (But Never Admit It)
What surprised me most is how much genuine mystery Mortimer bakes into this thing. Brendan disappears. The girl Gary calls "Satsuma" vanishes from the pub. And Gary - this utterly average thirty-year-old who describes himself as someone you'd notice only in passing - decides to actually DO something about it. The quest takes him through South London estates and pie shops, and the supporting cast is packed with characters who talk like real people having slightly unhinged conversations.
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing - that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Mortimer's comedy is the part above water. Below it, there's a real story about loneliness, about a man who's been coasting through life and suddenly finds a reason - however absurd - to engage with it. The Wodehouse Prize makes sense. Like Wodehouse, Mortimer uses comedy as architecture, not decoration.
My students would hate this. I love it. Not because it's difficult or demanding, but because it does something genuinely rare: it's funny AND it has a beating heart underneath all the weirdness. At six hours and fifty-two minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's the literary equivalent of that friend who tells you a shaggy dog story at the pub and somehow makes you care about the dog. Home Again gave me that same feeling of being in genuinely good hands with a story that shouldn't work as well as it does.
Who Gets to Sit at This Table
If you love British humor - the dry, sideways kind that trusts you to keep up - this is your book. If you're a Mortimer fan from his TV work, hearing him narrate his own fiction is a genuine treat, breathing and stumbles included. If you loved The Thursday Murder Club but wished it were weirder and less polished, this is its spiritual successor in spirit if not in structure.
Skip it if uneven audio quality genuinely bothers you. Skip it if you need your mysteries to follow genre rules. And maybe skip it if surrealist humor leaves you cold - Gary's world operates on its own logic, and you either buy the ticket or you don't.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
I wouldn't have picked this up on my own. A comedian's debut novel? I've been burned before. But Mortimer earned that Wodehouse Prize honestly, and hearing him read his own words - flaws and all - turned what could have been a pleasant paperback into something more personal and strange and alive. The prose deserves to be savored, even when the recording equipment apparently didn't get the memo.
(Principal Martinez, I listened to this during your Monday morning announcements. Gary Thorn's pie shop adventures were more compelling than the new attendance policy. I'm not sorry.)
