Speccie Literary Merger by 2nd Oct
 

Oh I don't know. I really don't.

Our next competition: literary merger

This year saw the largest-ever merger between two publishing houses when Penguin and Random House joined forces in an attempt to compete with the might of Amazon. You are invited to effect a literary merger of a different kind by blending two existing well-known books and providing a synopsis of the new title. Please email entries, of up to 150 words, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 October.

My first thought was Bleak House at Pooh Corner, but I couldn't get beyond the title. Here's another attempt at something.

ODYSSES (The Odyssey by Homer/Ulysses by James Joyce)

One year after the end of the Trojan war, and after many stirring adventures, Odysseus is ship-wrecked off the coast of Ireland. Swimming to shore through the Guinness-dark sea, he makes his way to Dublin, and finds himself in a bar.

Encountering Leopold Bloom and Steven Daedalus, he learns to drink vast quantities of sea-dark Guinness. The ensuing pub-crawl lasts for almost nine years, interrupted only by occasional pauses for defecation and urination.

During this binge, they meet a number of strange characters including a militant feminist named Circe, who believes that men are swine, and a sinister pimp called Hector, who describes himself as a “Tamer of Whores”. Odysseus finally drags himself away from his drinking companions, saying that he must “get back to the little woman.”

Meanwhile, Penelope, patiently waiting for her husband to return, whiles away the time by doing craft-work and indulging in erotic fantasies.

Bleak House at Pooh Corner is brilliant, Brian! The Turn of the Screwtape Letters is all I can come up thus far.

Bleak House at Pooh Corner and The Turn of the Screwtape Letters. Damn, I wish I'd thought of those. I'm working on something about Gone with the Wind in the Willows, which might shape up all right. Of course, merging two books doesn't necessarily require us to seize on a pair of overlapping titles, does it? Any two madly mismatched authors could have comic potential. Karl Marx and Jane Austen? John Milton and Charles Darwin? E.L. James and Beatrix Potter?

Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

A young man named Dorian Gray indulges in sado-masochistic practices involving whips, knives, and mysterious metallic implements, but maintains his air of innocent youthfulness as his painted portrait develops large bags under its eyes and a dazed, debauched look combining horror and mad concupiscence.

The Catch-22 In the Rye

A young man mistakenly enlists in the German army during World War II and discovers that the Nazis are all just a bunch of big phonies.

Harry Wittgenstein and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophus Stone

On his eleventh birthday orphan Harry Wittgenstein learns that he is a philosophical wizard, the question mark-shaped scar on his forehead indicating that he destined to identify the relationship between language and reality. He is whisked away from the world of muggles (non-philosophers) into the strange and magical realm of Hogwarts College, Cambridge, where he begins his training in metaphysics, epistemology and Quidditch under the aegis of Professor Albus Russell and battles the forces of evil with a red-hot poker. Can Harry define the limits of science with a series of declarative statements which are supposedly self-evident before it’s too late?

Damn, Chris, I was going to do 'Gone With the Wind in Willows'. I hope you haven't missed the potential of Rat Butler.

Nineteen Eighty-Four Charing Cross Road

The doubleplusgood story of how a twenty year correspondence between an American bibliophile and a bookseller from Airstrip One leads to both being convicted of thoughtcrime and subsequently tortured into betraying one another at the Ministry of Love.

Go for it, Rob. Neither of us has exclusive rights to those two titles, and our merged masterpieces are likely to be quite different, witness my total failure to come up with a Rat Butler character. In fact, I'm giving Rhett's most famous line to Badger, and changing "damn" to "tinker's cuss." This is a f**king children's book, after all.

It's certainly not a requirement, but where possible, I think it adds to the fun! In fact, devising such titles is perhaps more amusing than coming up with the synopsis. What on earth can I do with Sir Leicester Dedlock and Piglet?

I've sidestepped the whole title thing and plumped for combining Anthony Trollope's The Warden and Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I was wondering about doing the Seven Very Hungry Caterpillars of Wisdom.

Brilliant, Rob! I think Lucy might have missed a trick not setting the merged titles as a comp in itself. It's the probably more the Washington Post's line of country, though.

Right Ho, Dracula. Now what happens in this Bertie Wooster story?

Wide Sargasso Seabiscuit
The Unbearable Lightness of Jude the Obscure
Three Men in A Suitable Boy

You're right, Adrian, the titles are far more fun than actually coming up with the accompanying story. I particular like "Three Men in a Suitable Boy", and Rob's "Seven Very Hungry Caterpillars of Wisdom."

The trouble is that any synopsis of Three Men in a Suitable Boy would be otiose.

Well, I've had a stab at it, but the title remains the best part.

Bleak House at Pooh Corner

Sir Leicester Dedlock buys the Hundred-Acre Wood and decides to evict the residents.

Piglet becomes a ward in Chancery, but refuses to meet his lawyer as he is afraid that a Tulkinghorn may be something like a Heffalump, only fiercer.

Eeyore is forced to go to work as a crossing-sweeper, and complains bitterly of the wear and tear on his tail.

Inspector Bucket, one of the first detectives in English fiction, is called in when one of Pooh’s jars of honey is stolen, but fails to solve the mystery.

Ironically, the solution lies in a heap of papers hoarded by the illiterate Krook, who is bounced by Tigger and dies of spontaneous combustion.

Wol has spelling lessons with a tutor called Baynham Badger, a character thought to have strayed in from another book.

At the end of the novel, we learn that Christopher Robin is Lady Dedlock’s long-lost illegitimate child.

Brian, don't you find that writing a synopsis rather than an extract makes this assignment especially difficult? There's something about it that simply sucks the life out of the joke.

Exactly so, Adrian. Extracts are much more enjoyable. Synopses baffle my synapses.

You-all are too clever for me. I was just thinking along the lines of
Ulysses, or the White Whale.

What about 'To the Lighthouse at Pooh Corner', Brian?

Watership Down and Out in Paris and London

When a young rabbit called Fiver experiences a terrifying apocalyptic vision of the future he flees his home for Paris where he initially manages to scrape a meagre living as a lapine teacher to French kittens. However, this work soon dries up and fiver, now penniless and starving, is forced into accepting a job as an éplucheur at a local carrot restaurant. He finds the long hours and barbaric conditions there unendurable, so he ups sticks and moves to London where he lives as a 'gentlerabbit of the road', begging scraps of lettuce, moving from one Salvation Army warren to another and falling in for a time with a myxamatosed pavement artist.

Breakfast at Tiffanys and the Naked Lunch?

Do it, John!

'Tis Pity She's A Whorehouse at Pooh Corner?
The Black Cathouse at Pooh Corner?
The Brick Shithouse at Pooh Corner? (Need a book called The Brick Shithouse - surely a great Australian novel)

As for the other, this ought to do it. Cripes, I must write it!

Breakfast at Tiffanys and The Naked Lunch

Katy from Kansas, orphaned and alone,with a fistful of dollars from the sale of the family farm and eager for sophistication and experience, fresh off the flyer at Grand Central Station encounters the enigmatic and picturesquely scarred Viscount Ribblesdale, heir to an age-old title but little else except the whiff of scandal from liaisons with the the nazi-loving Prince of Wales and blackmailing boy lovers. She gets a borrowed tiara but loses her fresh-faced freckled innocence along with her knickers, all in the course of a single morning in New York. Set in Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age, this searing indictment of European greed and corruption and the spoiled American Dream, harks back to Henry James and forward to Tom Wolfe. In relentless jewelled prose reminiscent of the best of Nabokov Pulitzer-Prizewinner Hannah de Selby anatomises the hopes and fears of a whole generation.

"Don't go near the Water Babies" - but I can't muster up any enthusiasm for either component.

I've only just picked up this thread but had been playing with Bleak Pooh; as with so many of this Comp's possibilities, titles are perhaps the easy bits.

I was thinking of going for 'The Economic Consequences of the Fall', by Milton Keynes, but alas it would fall outside the rubric.

Why so, Bazza? Anyway, a book by 'Milton Keynes' is surely too good to waste. "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency" ... except perhaps by debauching the only two existing members of society? But I must resist the temptation to start messing about with your idea.

I think to 'merge' the titles you have to use both, or part of both, & Milton didn't write 'The Fall', that was Camus. 'The Economic Consequences of Paradise Lost' would be a clunky & unamusing title.

True, Bazza, but the 'brief' doesn't actually specify combining the titles, although it certainly adds to the fun if it can be done. You could always use Milton's opening line instead, which might be more amusing:

'The Economic Consequences Of Man's First Disobedience'

What is the comp number for this, John? I don't see it in the thread, but imagine it is 2818, since the next one is 2819.

I think it is 2818. Perhaps I ought to start putting that in.

Here's a very rude title, for which I do NOT intend to write a synopsis. The guilty parties are Jane Austen, Arthur Ransome, and Anna Smith.

Emma Swallows, and Amazons Spit against the Wind.

Normally, you do include the comp number, John. And normally the magazine's announcement of each new comp includes its number. I assume that you posted just "Our next competition" in this case because that all that was in the magazine, at least in the online version.

(For what it's worth, I also calculate that this one has to be No. 2818)

It wasn't in the print version either. I don't think it was.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Dune
 

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Dune

After narrowly escaping the destruction of Earth with help from a shapeshifting Face Dancer who whisks them both aboard a ship run by the Spacing Guild, a young man finds himself dropped off on a strange desert planet and must survive the intricacies of an internecine war between absurd religious, political, and tribal factions — with nothing to help him but his trusty Hitchhiker's Guide to Dune by Princess Irulan and his ragged Towel of the Weirding Way. Oh, and also while dodging monstrously big worms.


*Edit: Proposed sequel, called I, Kwisatz Haderach: Taking place at the same time as the first novel in the series, this would cover events from the perspective of a superbeing constructed by the powers that be for their own personal use who goes off program after attaining a state of super-consciousness.

A Scarlet Study, Leagues under the Sea
 

Removed to avoid 'prior publication'

P.S. Although not stated at start of thread, this is Competition No 2818, I believe.
And- Can anyone confirm whether titles are to be included in word-count, or are disregarded?