Hoblyn: A Novel in Three Parts

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Oliver’s novel details the fantastical voyage from gestation to death
of one Nottingham Berry Hoblyn, whose life’s work includes the
invention of “an entirely new literary genre:” writing the classics
backward. His creations include Prejudice and Pride, Cleopatra and
Anthony, The Salesman of Death, and Wonderland in Alice, to mention a
few.

Hoblyn speaks first to the reader from the “preconception” stage.
With supreme erudition (replete with learned footnotes), he narrates the
details of the failed prophylactic, which leads to his mother’s
pregnancy; he traces the history of the fetus (with references to
Gray’s Anatomy); and he reflects upon the world from the comfortable
vantage point of the womb. Things get even stranger in the second part
of the novel, “Hoblyn’s Utopia.” When he realizes his lack of
control over the world into which he is reluctantly born, Hoblyn decides
to “create a New World” from which he can “view the human
condition from the broadest of perspectives.” He peoples this Utopia,
his island of Hobland, with an assortment of alter egos.

Hoblyn positively reverberates with Swiftian echoes. The satire extends
to the Creator as politician—less a deity than an omnipotent governor.
Hoblyn’s secular kingdom unavoidably comes undone through the efforts
of villainous officials bent on self-aggrandizement. His death, “Morte
d’Hoblyn,” is the focus of the book’s final part, in which the
idealistic hero plays his way along a nine-hole golf course, with each
hole representative of literary landmarks and personal epiphanies.
Oliver’s tour de force is well worth the demands it makes on the
reader.