A wild picaresque fantasy, erotically polymorphous . . . with a cast of bizarre humans and talking animals Independent on Sunday
I glance down and see a dachshund nosing at my ankles. She is a stray. Together we walk to the station cafeteria and queue for 25 minutes to get tea and pies. Round her neck is a disk and it tells me her name is Mary.
The narrator and Mary alcoholic, drug-addicted, nymphomaniac embark on a dizzying odyssey through the abattoirs, strip clubs, prison cells, lunatic asylums and sewers of England. Encounters with hens, giant wood pigeons, snakes and many other species punctuate their progress. Bodily fluids flow profusely. Sexual malpractice is never more than a page away. Written in the months before his death in a car crash in 1970 at the age of twenty-two, Jonathan Barrow s The Queue is a book that doesn t know when to say when. It s a satire on the professional world; a mockery of the laws of good taste; a children s story turned inside out, wound around a core of innocence and affection.
The Queue is one of the most extraordinary, original and funniest books I have ever read. Subversive, satirical, like a farcical, erotic, animal-human animated film, it is, I think, a work of strange, obsessive genius.
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
The Queue is difficult to define. Picaresque encounters, recounted at speed, include bizarre scatological episodes and much random violence . . . Yet [Jonathan Barrow s] novel s final sentences prove that he possessed and could express compassion.
Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement
Wildly inventive and surreal . . . At its height Jonathan s writing has shades of Evelyn Waugh in its eye for detail and pomposity, fascination with the British class system and eye for the absurd
Jane Thynne, Literary Review
Savagely surreal . . . A rare comic talent
Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday
A highly idiosyncratic maypole . . . with its motley cast of schoolmasters, policemen, perverts, dogs and hens . . . repeatedly recalls Joe Orton in its macabre preoccupations and scabrous humour
Rupert Thomson, Guardian
Bizarre and beautiful
Janine Johnston, Waterstone s Books Quarterly
Darkly comic, treading a thin line between brilliance and total barminess
Elisabeth Day, Observer
The macabre fascination of an adolescent Mervyn Peake
Rory Bruce Knight, Country Life
Arrestingly ludicrous . . . apocalyptically violent
Stephanie Cross, The Lady
Jonathan wrote about animals, birds and fish as if they were human, implicitly deriding the absurd illogicality of human social behaviour --Patrick Skene Catling, Spectator
