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.