Milton in Purgatory – Edward Vass

Milton Pitt is something of a worrier. The reader, naturally siding with the protagonist, will very soon start to worry about him, also.
 
At the age of twenty-six, when one really should be bright and brimming with energy, discovering the world and exercising talents, Milton is just hopeless, lost and alone. He lives in the inspirational setting of Oxford, yet cut off from it, semi-broke, girlfriendless and apparently friendless. It reminded me of the time I spent on the dole, in existential angst and a mildewed bedsit, down the same Cowley Road.
 
Something has to give. And so Edward Vass goes about getting seriously inventive to give his protagonist the chance of another kind of experience altogether. Only it won’t be an easy ride.
 
Meaninglessness dogs Milton from a tedious office job by day to getting drunk at night. On top of all this, he’s a Spurs fan. He really doesn’t seem to have much going for him. Could it, you might reasonably wonder, get any worse? Well, stand by, because you’re about to find out. If you thought life was hard-going, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
 
Because there’s the crux of it. Milton wakes up in his room and discovers every reason to believe he has died. Only it isn’t anything like what you might expect, and so much so that he has to remind himself: “I’m not mad — just dead.” Edward Vass lets imaginative possibilities lead where they will. He clearly roots for his hapless hero, but suffice it to say that the helter-skelter after-life—or is it a dream?—can get somewhat gory as well as bewildering. That’s life — only it isn’t.
 
I liked the butterfly of Milton’s experience (you can see it on the front cover). It brought to mind Zhuangzi, who on waking from dreaming of being a butterfly, did not now know if he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming of being a man.
 
Present tense narratives tend to keep you guessing, and this appropriately matches our protagonist’s confusion in his plight, expressed with the jocular, self-deprecating defensiveness of a young Englishman. A new surprise awaits Milton Pitt around each corner, until a neat resolution that you will have to discover for yourselves.