I am reading Kruso by Lutz Seilerat the moment, a chunkster which won the German Book Prize, and because it’s a bit of a challenge, I’m breaking up the reading with other books that are not so demanding. Phil Day’s whimsical A Chink in a Daisy-chain makes an interesting companion, because just as Kruso is an homage to Robinson Crusoe, A Chink in a Daisy-chain owes a debt to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But it’s only 61 pages in length, and it’s absurdist and playful (which Kruso certainly isn’t).

Anna Welch in the foreword guides the journey:

Phil was beginning to get very tired of sitting by his colleague on the couch, and of having nothing to do … So begins a journey, entered via a chink in a chain of thought, as a man recalls a literary daisy-chain woven about a fictionalised girl on an imaginary riverbank on a distant golden afternoon, perhaps that of 4 July 1862. If you follow all the links in these daisy-memory-chains, you’ll find the connections are allusive but not elusive, as long as you know your Alice.

Well, I know my Alice quite well. I read it, and its companion Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, when I was a child, and I reread it more than once, and we had a recording of it which we listened to obsessively (my first ever audio book!). The narration was by the inimitable Joyce Grenfell, and I have a CD pirated from our original LP. I can’t find any reference to this LP online, but if you don’t know Joyce Grenfell, try this video at YouTube and then imagine that wonderful resonant voice intoning Down … Down… Down. … `I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time? I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/21/a-chink-in-a-daisy-chain-by-phil-day/ ( )