It is with great regret that we have to inform readers that Laslo Plinge’s infamous novel The Importance of Canvas has been reprinted. Directly and indirectly responsible for a multitude of suicides, we urge the curious and the unwary to avoid this work as if it were the pox itself.
“A futile work on the futility of everything….” Wrote the critic Peregrine Phlinche-Finn shortly after reading the book – and just before he defenestrated himself from the 18th floor. The review which appeared in the Highbury & Islington Bugle simply read Aaaaargh! – supposedly a verbatim transcript of Oscar Smyth’s critique as he streaked naked down the Caledonian Road, with purple painted hair, before finally coming to rest underneath a number 38 omnibus.
Yet why has this controversial novel caused such upset? The Importance of Canvas was first published in 1948 by Ging, Gang & Gooley, a company which specialised in works concerning outdoor pursuits and all things camp. It was bought by accident by thousands of happy campers under the mistaken belief that it was a practical guide to tents. It wasn’t. The death toll in London that year was higher than any year since the blitz. The campers were no longer happy.
The plot of the novel, such as it is, recalls the tale of Paslo LLinge – some believe this to be a heavily disguised version of Laslo himself – and a night spent under the titular canvas. Over the course of the night – and some 468 pages – he describes in detail, in tiny exactingly excruciating detail, every strand and fibre of canvas in his vision.
The whole work is futile, it says nothing, it reaches no denouement because as the reader discovers after struggling through the dense punctuation free prose that Plinge himself couldn’t be bothered to finish it. As a reflection on the futility of individual existence and pointlessness of struggle –because it is a bloody struggle to read – it stands un-paralleled in the history of literature.
However, amongst all the death, self-harming, protests, book burning and lamentations the book had one stalwart defender, Samuel Beckett, who said of it:
Cor, lumey that was a wizard read.
As for Plinge himself, he returned to his first love of quantity surveying (“give me any quantity and I’ll survey it” was his catchphrase)before dying in 1973 after sleeping naked on the side of Ben Nevis having forgot The Importance of Canvas.
Ye Imp 