Room for Growth

It was Friday and I was very excited to receive a letter from the agency. I had completed another novel and felt confident that it was good enough for publication. It was more mature and accomplished than my previous efforts eschewing maudlin cliches and instead punching the reader in the metaphorical gut with emotional complexity and pathos. It's a novel that deals with community, identity, ambivalence, hubris and baking. The story takes place in Brith, a small bucolic village. The inhabitants are the apotheosis of pastoral England. There is the avuncular parish priest, Michael Forney aka DJ Satan who mixes mashed-up acid jungle when the children play musical chairs on Saturday nights; the senile octogenarian spinster who solves crime - in her mind; the jolly landlord and lady of The Pentium Processor; and lovely Mr Cartwright who makes cheese toasties for cats. At the centre of it all is the bakery which is the glue that holds the village together as well as the home of the Brith Boomerang - a baguette with a right angle. Attracted by the doughy warmth, everybody meets there to discuss politics, education and health care or to laugh over an iced bun. It's an enviably utopian existence. Then a body is found in the river. Nobody claims to know to whom it belongs. It requires Oscar, a young, self-assured postman "with buttocks like seared bacon" to work out what's going on. The body belongs to the baker, John Dasel. But where's John? Through investigations during his morning round he uncovers the dark truth. As one disgruntled woman puts it: "John was incapable of playing a forehand in tennis; wore shorts on a Tuesday; hated biscuits; and forced his wife to pee on the rug. Despite these things, everybody turned a blind eye because he made amazing bread." However, this collective ignorance held no currency when John made an alteration to the Brith Boomerang. "It was a slap in the face of everything everyone was told to stand for." John had the arrogance to use wholemeal flour without a single mention to the BC (Brith Committee). "He had to go – it was analogous to something awful." The novel reaches a tense denouement in which Oscar, perplexed and horrified by the moral inadequacy of his home, absent-mindedly posts himself and chokes to death.

I tentatively opened and read the letter:

Dear Mr Ppplejhii,
It's drivel.
Yours,
Dave and Fat Susan