Playlist

It's Monday. You meet the devil. He tells you the world ends next Sunday. What are you going to do? Charlie Fish decides, if he's got to go, then at least he's going out with one hell of a good soundtrack. Playlist is a wildly original and inventive novel, by turns hilarious and terrifying - and it marks a welcome return to publishing for an author not heard from in fifteen years. Pete Davies is best known for All Played Out, his classic account of the Italian World Cup in 1990. From 1986 to 2002, he had eleven books published - then he disappeared. Now he's back - with a stunning, thought-provoking comedy about a well-meaning man having a Really Bad Week. Charlie's got a flat tyre, the DVD player's broken, the weather's terrible, the NHS has collapsed, the world's running out of bananas, Elton John's blown up his kitchen - and then there's the small matter of the apocalypse.Mind you, it might not happen. The devil's team on the job are such a bird-brained pair of incompetents that, he freely admits, they might just blow up the moon by mistake. You can't get the staff, can you?Amid the comedy, however, Playlist in the end is a fable about faith. Charlie Fish is a vulnerable, imperfect man - a sober alcoholic struggling to fit in with a chaotic, confusing, disintegrating world. As each day passes and something else goes wrong, as the malfunctions of society mount up all about him, he keeps on trying just to hold it together and to do the right thing. It's a story about big subjects - life, death, love, God and music - and it's a story where if he plays his hand right, he might even get to see a happy ending.Albeit, perhaps, not quite the one he imagined. When you think you know where you're going, after all, God pretty often turns out to have a different idea.