Gulls and Chuffs

If Milton's Paradise Lost was written to justify the ways of God to man, then the much much more modest aim of Gulls & Chuffs is to reveal (though most definitely not justify) something of the ways of men to women. It does this through a primary focus on male masturbation, more precisely the masturbatory stylings of e c love, the narrator. His preoccupations and fantasies drive the style and content of the novel. They are: lesbianism & female bisexuality, literature… (more)

If Milton's Paradise Lost was written to justify the ways of God to man, then the much much more modest aim of Gulls & Chuffs is to reveal (though most definitely not justify) something of the ways of men to women. It does this through a primary focus on male masturbation, more precisely the masturbatory stylings of e c love, the narrator. His preoccupations and fantasies drive the style and content of the novel. They are: lesbianism & female bisexuality, literature & literary criticism, titles, Shakespeare, female auto-eroticism, female dominance, marriage and God (in something like that order of importance). The book is a comedy set in London between the late 1980s and the early naughties. It features an unreliable narrator and his self-assigned literary apprenticeship and takes the reader through the various stages of that apprenticeship via diary entries, short-stories, autobiographical reflections and critiques. In addition to exposing the dark side of the narrators mind the material also reflects some of the key movements of the age relating to male and female social roles and identities. In so far as the main topic of the novel is the over-heated sexual imagination of the author, its true domain is fantasy. Through that fantasy a sustained story about the psychological development of a man, a writer and maybe also a marriage is revealed.