The Mule by David Quantick review – a comedy thriller from The Thick of It writer

This original and intriguing story about a hapless translator on the trail of a mysterious book just isn’t bizarre enough

The hero and narrator of David Quantick’s comic thriller is a translator called Jacky. He is keen to point out that his translation work involves neither working at the UN nor on tractor manuals, evidently the two connotations of the word “translator” in the popular imagination. Instead, Jacky specialises in translating mostly obscure European fiction. This is not a job that has involved any degree of excitement, until he begins the novel by being chatted up by a beautiful woman in a bar. This is an unusual – in fact unprecedented – event in the life of someone who is far from being a lothario, and indeed doesn’t seem to get out much.

Alas, the seduction goes wrong back at Jacky’s spartan little flat, after he sneaks a peek at the intriguing book his seductress is carrying – a volume written in a made-up language and illustrated with photos of the woman herself, posing as the victim of various kinds of execution. His curiosity understandably piqued, Jacky secretly reads a couple of pages, but is discovered doing so by the unnamed woman, who storms off in high dudgeon.

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