Puckoon is Spike Milligan’s only full-length novel and is a total act of literary sabotage; yay!

Set in a small Irish border town accidentally split in two, the book uses farce, absurdism, and deliberate disintegrating to take aim at nationalism, bureaucracy, religion, and the shittiness of officialdom.

Jokes interrupt themselves, footnotes revolt, typography misbehaves, and sentiment is immediately undercut. Underneath the nonsense, though, is a real anger at arbitrary borders and the people crushed by them. It’s funny, yes — but it’s also one of the sharper anti-state novels of the 20th century, hiding its teeth behind clown paint.