Ned Beauman’s stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny and dangerously unsteady historical novel doesn’t even know what year it is
Ned Beauman
Ned Beauman’s novels – four to date – have come about, he says, as a result of ‘the struggle I feel personally as a writer between my bourgeois realist literary fiction side and my pulp side’
That struggle is perhaps also why he is often labelled an ‘experimental’ novelist. However, it is not a trait he recognises: ‘I don’t think I do anything in my books that hasn’t been done before somewhere. I don’t see them as genuinely avant-garde and I don’t have that modernist urge to break fiction open.’ Nevertheless, he confesses that part of the motivation behind The Teleportation Accident was as a response to reviewers of his first novel on Amazon. He decided ‘to take all the caveats they had and really emphasise those things, to slough off as many of them as possible’.