There is a nervousness that descends when a beloved celebrity, especially a comedian, announces they have written a book. We have all been burned before and will probably continue to be (I still haven't been able to finish reading The Book of Elsewhere). The celebrity novel is a well-established genre of disappointment, the literary equivalent of a perfume launch, and the temptation to write one off before the first page is almost overwhelming.

So I came to The Satsuma Complex with my guard up, despite a deep and longstanding affection for the man behind it. I need not have worried. This is not a vanity project dressed up as fiction. It is a genuinely good book, funny and oddly moving, and it confirms what anyone who has watched Bob Mortimer flounder gloriously on Would I Lie to You? or his short Train Guy videos already suspected: the man is a storyteller of rare and peculiar gifts.

Mortimer needs little introduction, but the relevant biography matters here. Born in Middlesbrough in 1959, he trained as a solicitor before a chance meeting with Vic Reeves in the 1980s rerouted his life into comedy and the long, surreal partnership of Reeves and Mortimer. His 2021 memoir And Away... became the bestselling memoir of that year, and it was the act of writing it, by his own account, that gave him the appetite to try fiction.

He has spoken about wanting to emulate Haruki Murakami, which on paper sounds like the setup to one of his own jokes, yet the influence is there if you squint: the everyman narrator, the gentle dislocation from reality, the talking animals. The legal background matters too, because Gary Thorn, our narrator, is a thirty-year-old legal assistant at a firm of solicitors in London, and the world of the book is steeped in the small humiliations of that life.

The plot, at least to begin with, is deceptively modest. Gary goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. Brendan leaves early, and Gary falls into conversation with a young woman in the pub. He is instantly smitten, but she vanishes without giving her name, leaving him only the book she was reading: The Satsuma Complex. Gary, lacking anything better to call her, christens her Satsuma in his head. Then Brendan turns up dead, the police come knocking, and Gary's quiet, beige little existence begins to unravel into something altogether stranger. What follows is a quest of sorts, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to find the woman he calls Satsuma and to work out what on earth has happened to Brendan. If that sounds like a fairly standard comedy crime setup, that is because it is. The bones of the story are not where the originality lies.

Where the book truly comes alive is in Gary himself. He is one of the most endearing narrators I have read in some time. Assuredly unheroic, Mortimer goes to some lengths to stress that Gary has no hidden reserves of courage waiting to emerge, no buried competence that the plot will eventually unlock. He is anxious, lonely, a little lost, and almost pathologically polite. His only real friend is his much older, splendidly cantankerous neighbour Grace, whose sheepdog Lassoo provides a recurring source of low comedy. The friendship between Gary and Grace is the warm beating heart of the novel, an easy interdependence that develops with real tenderness, and it gives the book an emotional ballast that its plot alone could never supply.

And then there are the squirrels. Gary talks to squirrels on his way to work, and, in his imagination at least, they talk back. This is the device that will either charm you or lose you entirely. The squirrels are very funny, dispensing their skewed wisdom and salty observations, and they fit the slightly off-kilter texture of Gary's mind perfectly. My one quibble, and it is a quibble shared by other readers I have since compared notes with, is that they are occasionally pressed into service to clarify a plot point that did not really need clarifying, as though Mortimer did not quite trust us to keep up. It is a small flaw, and a forgivable one, but it is there.

The prose itself is where Mortimer's comic identity is most unmistakable. You can hear his deadpan delivery in every line, that particular rhythm of ever-so-slightly faulty reasoning followed by a left-field observation designed to knock you sideways. Gary's narration is studded with the kind of absurd similes and digressions that have made Mortimer a national treasure, and the dialogue between his cast of oddballs (Grace, the gym-obsessed café owner Wayne, assorted villains both menacing and ridiculous) crackles with that same energy. It is whimsical without being twee, silly without being slight. There is a real craft in making prose this loose-looking actually work on the page, and Mortimer manages it more often than not.

Structurally, the novel does something rather clever about halfway through. Having spent the first part entirely inside Gary's head, it shifts perspective to Emily, the woman Gary has been calling Satsuma, and here the book deepens considerably. There is far more to her than the dreamy love interest Gary has constructed, and the moment the narrative hands her the reins is the point at which you find yourself sitting up and reading faster. It is a well-judged gear change, and it rescues the book from becoming merely a one-note charm offensive.

The only real critical observations I have are ones that are quite obvious. The mystery itself is functional; readers coming looking for an ingenious crime plot may be slightly disappointed. The villains are broad while the squirrels, as noted, sometimes overstay their welcome. This is a comedy first and a thriller a distant second, and anyone expecting the reverse will be disappointed. But to judge it on those terms would be to miss the point entirely. The Satsuma Complex is a book about loneliness and the small, unlikely connections that pull us out of it, wrapped in a layer of gleeful nonsense. That it went on to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2023 feels entirely right; it sits squarely in that very British tradition of comic writing that values warmth as highly as wit.

This is no cynical celebrity cash-in but a debut of real character, written by someone who clearly loves the act of telling a story and cannot help being funny while he does it. It is the rare comic novel that made me laugh out loud and then, a few pages later, feel a genuine pang for its lonely, decent narrator. If you already adore Bob Mortimer, you will find everything you love about him distilled onto the page. And if you do not yet, this is a thoroughly delightful place to be converted. I have rarely closed a book with such a grin on my face, and I mean that as the highest praise.

SFBook Reviews

Message History

Delivery option(s)