{"product_id":"doubled-up-or-my-life-as-the-back-end-of-a-pantomime-horse-by-t-j-lustig","title":"'Doubled Up, or My Life as the Back End of a Pantomime Horse' by T. J. Lustig","description":"\u003ch4 data-start=\"80\" data-end=\"487\"\u003eA strange, comic novel assembled as a sequence of twenty numbered episodes, each announced by a title that sounds like an instruction, confession or failed conjuring trick: “I Lose a Tooth,” “Magic, or Wax,” “A Pair of Hands.” \u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp data-start=\"489\" data-end=\"1013\"\u003eLustig’s narrator moves through a world of theatrical contraptions, wax figures, physical mishaps and miniature histories, treating objects as if they possessed their own occult biographies. The pantomime horse of the subtitle is both joke and method: existence experienced from the obstructed half, doubled with another body, moving without quite seeing where it is going. The prose is learned but deliberately unruly, slipping between autobiography, grotesque comedy, cultural history and something close to the fantastic.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-start=\"1015\" data-end=\"1480\"\u003eLong out of print and little discussed, this is an eccentric early-1990s British novel for readers drawn to comic experimental fiction, unreliable memoir and books in which scholarship gradually mutates into hallucination. Lustig later became better known as a literary scholar of Henry James and Thomas Malory; here, the same appetite for ghosts, doubles and unstable identities is allowed considerably more room to misbehave. \u003cspan class=\"\" data-state=\"closed\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-start=\"1482\" data-end=\"1614\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePicador paperback, 1992; first Picador edition. General cover wear, rubbing and creasing; pages lightly aged.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"bower studio","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45869429129299,"sku":null,"price":14.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0689\/0268\/2707\/files\/Yourparagraphtext-2026-07-27T181305.878.png?v=1785140083","url":"https:\/\/bowerbooks.com\/products\/doubled-up-or-my-life-as-the-back-end-of-a-pantomime-horse-by-t-j-lustig","provider":"bower books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}