Along with Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin was one of the staples of my teenaged reading life – my younger self could regularly be found chortling at the adventures of Pooley, O’Malley, Professor Slocombe, Hugo Rune, Cornelius Murphy and Tuppe. Rankin’s idiosyncratic idiom, pun-laden prose, eye-catching titles and surreal plotlines were a joy to me, especially the inaccurately named Brentford Trilogy, which ended up as five books. Then, unlike Pratchett, I rather grew out of Rankin’s oeuvre – and Retromancer is the first book of Rankin’s I have read for quite some time. It’s really rather good.

Retromancer is a tale of Hugo Rune, the seemingly immortal know-it-all, freeloader extraordinaire, and his young acolyte, Rizla. Rizla is actually the teenage incarnation of that Brentford layabout Jim Pooley, and when he awakes one day to find his beloved Brentford subtly altered in numerous disturbing ways (Bratwurst for breakfast at The Wife’s Legs Cafe?), only Huge Rune can provide the answers and suggest the means to put history right, and reinstate a world where the Nazis did not win World War II by nuking America.

The twelve adventures that follow, shaped as they are by the pack of tarot cards that Rune gives to Rizla, are set during the Second World War, with Brentford the central base of operations. There are shades of Doctor Who in Rune and Rizlas adventures through time and space, bouncing from key points in history (like Bletchley Park) to hidden backwaters of British life, via some very surreal plots like an attempt to steal the Crown Jewels that is thwarted by characters escaped from some Rankinesque version of Lord of the Rings.

Rankin’s far-fetched fiction, as he calls it, is well-represented by Retromancer – it’s simultaneously funny, silly, clever, linguistically deft and sometimes very childish. Rankin doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as smash through it and jump up and down on the ruins in hobnailed boots, but that’s all part of the fun. Hugo Rune is a great creation, determined never to pay for lunch, patronising to his interchangeable acolytes yet somehow magnetic and compelling at the same time, and Rizla’s frustration and bafflement are easy to understand. A fine slab of silliness.

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