An interesting test-case for how much your really care about literary innovation and modernism: Firbank, like other modernists, eliminates much of the traditional novel. There's no plot, there's little attempt to unify anything, he doesn't bother helping the reader understand what's going on. If you want to know what's going on, pay attention. He won't spoon feed you.

On the other hand, Firbank is utterly unlike any other modernist, because rather than deal with THE WASTE LAND or model himself on Homer, he writes fripperies. The Eccentricities really is about what its title suggests. The bit question in the book is whether the Cardinal will be removed from his diocese for baptising his rich parishioner's puppies. Plot spoiler: yes. He is not interested in boiling his prose down to hard diamond like nuggets. He stuffs as many words as he can into his sentences, particularly adverbs and adjectives. He always chooses the word order that sounds best (or perhaps oddest), never the one that makes matters clearer. Consider: "Returning however no answer she moved distractedly away." (McElroy gets a lot of praise for this lightly punctuated kind of thing; Firbank, of course, doesn't write about big political themes).

So, dear reader, do you really care for interesting, different, odd artworks? If so, Firbank is for you. It's best to read his novels as you would look at a painting; any plot is implicit, the characters are only ever their surface appearances; they are arranged in space, rather than narrative time. We love that in paintings; why not try it in prose?

On the other hand, if you're like me, and you like modernism mainly because of its ideas, or like aesthetically progressive literature because it's left wing, Firbank will be quite a challenge. ( )

Ronald Firbank whips up a ‘froth of choirboys’ in his 1926 novel Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. One choir boy, the ‘impish Chicklet’, is portrayed as an unobtainable tease. After serving dinner, Chicklet bids His Eminence good night and says, ‘And if you should want me sir . . .’ Chicklet forgets his responses during Mass one day and the cardinal locks him in a vault full of coffins. He later relents, unlocks the vault where he finds Chicklet fast asleep. As he mutters, ‘...and lead us not into temptation’, Chicklet wakes up and provokes the cardinal to chase him round and round the cathedral while the boy openly flirts and mocks him. The unfortunate Don Alvaro Narciso Hernando Pirelli, Cardinal-Archbishop of Clemenza, dies of a heart attack and is found naked on the floor the next morning. ( )