It has been compared with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Kibby is shy and inward-looking, and drinks Horlicks, collects model trains, and obsessively plays a computer game called Harvest Moon.

He is disappointed in this as it turns out the man was exclusively homosexual during the period in question, but does find love at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, in the shape of American Dorothy Cominsky.

On the contrary, it is alcohol abuse which punctuates the novel, along with the themes of personal identity (touched upon in Marabou Stork Nightmares) and romantic love (The Undefeated, from Ecstasy).

Skinner's mother is a former punk fan, and although the question of her son's paternity is as good as answered by the end of the book, a possibility remains that Joe Strummer, the late Clash singer, could also have been a candidate.