In his fourth novel, The Auguste, Keith Blackburn has succeeded in that rare literary feat of combining poeticity with a strong narrative, full of humour and pathos.

The ‘Auguste’ of the title refers to a type of clown - the most stupid one with exaggerated features and ragged clothes. This archetype is what Algy Tuckett, a 22-year-old clerk at the Gurney and Barman wool mill, finds himself metamorphosised into on waking one morning in 1932. And not only has he become a clown, he has also grown old and decrepit. Taking this in his stride, he attempts to get to his office, or a doctor, or to awake from a bad dream, only to be side-tracked along the way by a series of events that take place in locations which are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar to him, and include people who he knows but doesn’t know, at the same time.

If The Auguste cannot be filed neatly into a genre, it certainly belongs to a strong literary lineage of characters who find themselves trying to make the best of an alien and unforgiving environment. Allusions to Eliot’s Prufrock point to Algy’s pathetic impotence. He surrenders to an incomprehensible world from which he is detached, echoing other literary predecessors found in the works of Kafka, Becket, Carrol, Vian and O’Brien.

Language becomes as detached from reality as the surrealistic settings. References to Humpty Dumpty’s flexible attitude towards meaning is evoked, and Blackburn shares Vian and O’Brien’s playfulness with language, using wordplay and well constructed sentences that, on closer inspection, are complete nonsense - and Algy submissively accepts these floating signifiers without question.

But don’t think that The Auguste is a tortured tale of alienation. Far from being a melancholy existential outsider, Algy, in his naivety, is more akin to the hapless comic anti-hero, so beloved of British comedy films of the 1950s.

With this far-ranging intertextuality, The Auguste offers a poetic and entertaining tapestry that depicts the unfortunate predicament that Algy Tuckett finds himself in. And in the ’pataphysical logic of the novel, the way out seems, in some strange way, to be satisfyingly apt.