The Medusa Frequency

Based around the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, this novel also involves a mysterious space-dwelling being who is forever stuck in the Blughole of the Universe, which made me laugh uncontrollably for ages back in the day when I lived in West London. People have compared it with Douglas Adams probably for this. 

Hoban (1925-2011) always seemed like a 'writers' writer' to me - always experimenting, taking new angles, although with constant themes such as Orpheus and Eurydice, lions, and marital breakdown, taking only second place to Phil Collins in mining this vein for material! He's sometimes billed as a fantasy writer but that somehow misses the point - it's fabulism, or fabulation, or magical realism, or something, the fantasy elements are part of the framework, not the thing itself. 

He's best known perhaps for "Riddley Walker," his post-apocalyptic novel of a future fragmented England, which Will Self seems to …

I read this in a couple of late night sessions in my now-lost little flat in West Kensington, above one of the lost rivers of west London. I remember being reduced to helpless laughter by the word 'blughole'; but also the weirdness and the wildness of the hapless death of Orpheus and his wandering head seeking vengeance (probably And why not?) have stayed with me ever since. The Medusa of course was also a thing with a head and in its case turned others to stone even after it was cut off and Perseus drew it from his bag.
This is a book as full of mythology and immanence as the place I read it in, and as much as the place I live in now does not - as far as I can tell - have those things, although trees are a kind of nexus (Nexo? Vollma?) for those …