I live a few miles from Twickenham, ‘Home of English Rugby’, now ‘Home of Honest Publishing’. I was visiting a small independent bookshop there a couple of years ago, checking on any possible sales of Vault. The assistant bookseller, whom I knew from his previous job in Staines, pointed me to a small display by ‘a new local publisher’.

I’m always happy to support small presses, especially local ones, so I examined the display. Two were poetry collections, which is not my field, so despite the enticement of Wedding Swimwear For Mermaids I bought the two fiction titles.

One of them, The Wooden Tongue Speaks, by Bogdan Tiganov, turned out to be a mixture of poetry and prose, but highly engaging on both sides. Tiganov is from Romania, and his homeland and homelife there form the subject matter. I was very interested in this, as reading first hand accounts, fictional and autobiographical, of Eastern Europe post-Communism helps correct the gritty-romantic misconceptions we hold in the West. And these, the stories especially, reflected both the drabness and dreams of a society trying to make sense of themselves, but through the intensely personal lives of the narrators’ world.

The other book was an entirely prose work (I hesitated to describe it as a novel at that point): The Killing Of A Bank Manager, by Paul Kavanagh. This I admit I struggled with at first, trying to get my bearings, then just relaxed and settled down for the ride. It was exhilarating.

Kavanagh would, I gather, see himself as part of a robust counter-tradition taking in writers such as Raymond Roussel and Stefan Themerson, which is probably correct as far as it goes but doesn’t go far enough: Kavanagh is too much his own man to be categorized. Or even described, adequately, although I need to try.

As to plot, suffice it to say that no bank manager died in the making of this novel. The plot is simply a postponing device to enable the whole surreal lexical logic unfold, in all its whimsically absurdist wit, and the characters to have their lives (my favourite was the one named Les, which turned out to be short for ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’, which gives a small index of the wordplay here).

In my initial struggle to ‘place’ Kavanagh’s work, I had recourse to a synaesthetic comparison with the visual arts: it struck me as sharing the approach, and qualities, of Outsider Art or ‘Art Brut’, and I learnt later that in fact Kavanagh has a strong interest in Henry Darger, and the Victorian painter and parricide Richard Dadd.

Ultimately, though, the trick is to forget all such attempts at placing and just follow the anarchically inventive text wherever it leads, and enjoy the oddly-angled new views.

The trouble with that advice lies in applying it to the task of writing a blurb, which I was asked to do by Honest for Kavanagh’s second novel, Iceberg (I guess they got wind of my local proximity). Again I could only use a visual comparison, this time to the cartoons of Donald McGill (he of the English seaside postcards) or Viz. There was the same endearingly smutty innocence, enabling Kavanagh and the reader to see the characters both in suspension as caricatures, and close up as fully engaging and piercingly sympathetic creatures.

There is this time a stronger plot — an impoverished couple living in rented squalor in a grimy Northern town, win a lottery, the prize for which is their own iceberg, involving a trip first through Europe and beyond, then a cruise on the iceberg through fictionally uncharted oceans, coming to rest, Ark-like, on the top of the Statue of Liberty in a now-drowned New York.

Which doesn’t help much in conveying the appeal of the book. I can’t make that appeal any clearer; I can only say, Read the novel.

Kavanagh comes originally from Manchester, hence the exactitude of his descriptions of the North of England, moved south to Canterbury where he worked (I was delighted to learn) as a postman while writing Killing Of A Bank Manager, then moved with his American wife to the United Staes, North Carolina, I believe — I have seen a wonderful photograph of him resplendent in his red Royal Mail coat against the Carolina hills. So maybe his next novel (there is one; I have read it — echt-Kavanagh throughout) will be picked up by an American small press. Anyone up for it? Up to it?

Between these two Kavanagh novels, Honest published one by an all-American, the Wisconsin-born Ryder Collins. Her novel Homegirl is as inventive as Kavanagh’s in its depiction of the feisty eponymous heroine (anti-heroine? not really). It was described by the Canadian magazine Front & Centre as a truly twentyfirst-century book in its fictional approach, and becoming something of a cult hit in America, I gather.

The latest publication from Honest has the potential to be their break-out book, and a fantasy cult hit, a twentyfirst-century Lord Of The Rings: The Vorrh. I have to own up to not having read it, fantasy, like poetry, not being my field (I found at an early age that hobbits brought me out in a rash). I’m tempted, though, to overcome my reluctance, as it has a lot of non-‘fantasy’ elements going for it.

One is its author, Brian Catling. Catling is an artist, sculptor, film-maker and art writer (I came across an interesting essay by him in a Graham Sutherland catalogue).

Another is that the title comes fom Raymond Roussel — the Vorrh is the name of a forest in his Impressions Of Africa. Roussel is a writer I do admire; co-opted as honorary predecessor by both the Surrealists and the OuLiPo group, his novels are fantastic constructions, a blend of Paul Klee and Heath Robinson (to use yet another synaesthetic short-cut).

And lastly the prose, or maybe the poetry; from the reviews I’ve seen, Catling’s writing is strongly poetic, and the ‘Fantasy’-tag wholly inadequate.

It is also illustrated — by Catling — and the first in a projected series.

So for all sorts of reasons, I’m hoping this achieves at least some of its potential — for partly selfish reasons: if it proves the success Honest deserve, it will ensure continuation of their existence as a strongly-independent and independently-minded press, able to unearth further literary talent such as those I have discussed, talent which would continue to be ignored by mainstream publishing.