“One never… asks is it a novel,” wrote John Cheever in 1977. “One asks is it interesting.” Definitely not a novel – whatever its publishers say – but definitely very interesting is Jack Hilton’s 1935 book Caliban Shrieks, equal parts autobiography, political screed and artful rant, now reissued in hardback by Vintage Classics and lauded last week as a lost literary masterpiece in the New Yorker.
Channelling Shakespeare’s monstrous Caliban (“the red plague rid you for learning me your language”), Hilton’s narrator uses literary expression to fume at the conditions of the working man – and non-working man – in early 20th-century England. “Oh, the blinking, farcical tragedy of it!”
