Competition synopsis

"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is
passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."

Manley, a hedonist, and Hen, a quixotic clown, live in digs on campus,
drinking gourmet coffee and washing their laundry. They're looking for
something to fire their interest. Well, Hen is.

Helen, Besse, Lianne, Mary and Sian are the mature, headstrong,
socially competent young women who live on the floor above them. They
stay up late at night playing poker, reading 18th century erotica and
throwing dinner parties with as much food and wine as they can cram
into their tiny kitchen.

They're exactly what Hen is looking for; "a nest of harpies," as Manley
puts it, before Hen drags him bodily into the girls' extravagant,
getabout lifestyle, relishing every observation he makes of them, and
every secret he can extract. The girls' responses vary considerably,
and Hen soon causes friction.

Kett lives on another part of campus. She is a wild girl who collects
graffiti from public toilets and worries about the amount of spiders
she scoffs in her sleep. She meets Hen by coincidence when they both
stumble out of the Norwich market in search of the loo.

Kett soon discovers Hen's single-minded desire to solve the
unfathomable mysteries of his 'harpies', and his remarkable ability to
memorise swarms of tiny details by pretending to write them down on a
distinctive surface, such as a body part. She immediately begins asking
favours of him, persuading him to use his ability at first for
experiments, then to liberate him from his obsession with the five
girls.

Once Kett has coaxed Hen into writing visibly, and on paper, so that
she can read his notes, his activities become even more intense,
breaking out into fantasy and verse. The novel becomes a panoply of
visions, visual energy and points of view - part scrapbook, part
guidebook, part comic strip. One example sees Hen imagine he is
following Socrates and Nietzsche round a pitch and putt course, another
envisions an apocalyptic near-future.

Hen's infatuation with the 'harpies' remains as strong as ever, and
their reactions to him become ever more extreme, ranging from love to
hate, intrigue to indifference. His fantasies become more violent, his
actions more threatening - one story found scrawled on the breezeblock
walls prophesises the death of one of the girls.

Sensing the imminent danger and realising she is partly to blame, Kett
conspires with Manley, and the two of them convince Hen to return to
Manchester for the summer.

Hen's visions initially become worse, and culminate in a conversation
with a postbox. Realising how close he has come to outright lunacy, Hen
returns to Norwich to try at last to resolve his relationships with
Kett, Manley and the girls.