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[12:35] A Dancing Bear - Rating: 4/5
A Dancing Bear is the debut book of one Mark Osher. Sadly it seems that it could be his last as, due to repeated rejections from publishers, he has taken the somewhat drastic measure of disappearing!
I finished it this afternoon after spending about 15 hours over the last four days dedicated to devouring it - the only thing that stopped me reading it any faster is the fact that it is online and it's hard to curl up in bed with the internet.
The story is set in Australia and centers on a portion of the life and times of Fenton Brand, a university student whose life gets a little "complicated". Every theme you could ask for is contained within: unrequited love, revolution and radicalism, sex, political correctness, poetry, blundering ineptitude, serial-killers and terrorists and it is unrelentingly funny from Chapter 1.
If comparisions had to be made, the closest literary allusions I could make would be to Tom Sharpe. A Dancing Bear, like the work of Mr Sharpe, does come with a bit of a language warning but it's all part of the vernacular of the people at the core of the story.
The only reason I haven't given A Dancing Bear five out of five is because I'm hanging on to the slender hope that Mark shall re-appear and produce another, even better, book.