Generations of readers of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series have enjoyed the books without having to contemplate the erotic properties of the canine member of the quintet. After reading Nicholas Royle’s one-of-a-kind fantasia on Blyton and David Bowie, they may never be able to do so again. Royle writes confidently that ‘the most obvious route to thinking about sex in the Famous Five books is Timmy the dog’. Once this bombshell has been absorbed, he knocks the reader down again by writing: ‘Timmy is a big dog. He is a big-tongued dog. He must have had a huge donger too.’

The idea behind David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine first occurred to its author during the first 2020 lockdown. He was, by his own admission, drinking too much through boredom and frustration and listening to his favourite Bowie songs every night, as well as reading Blyton’s books to his young son. Out of this unlikely juxtaposition came the idea to write this encomium to Bowie and Blyton, structured mainly as a series of lectures delivered to an imaginary audience and revolving around the image of the ‘sun machine’, an all-conquering orb which Bowie sang about in his 1969 single ‘Memory of a Free Festival’. There are digressions aplenty, how-ever. Royle tackles everything from his disdain for Michael Gove and his unhappiness at the decline of teaching standards in universities to his affectionate but distant relationship with his father. It is in keeping with the book’s often priapic tone that Royle suggests, of his mother: ‘I never got the sense that the phallus much excited her.’

‘The most obvious route to thinking about sex in the Famous Five books is Timmy the dog’

Royle thanks his editor Matthew Frost in the acknowledgements, but this book seems to have been spewed forth into the world untouched by the hand of a publisher. The discursive, conversational tone that the bulk of it – the lectures – is delivered in alternates between amusingly wry and simply bizarre. It’s clear that Royle is more interested in writing on Bowie, about whom he is often incisive and original, than he is in tackling Blyton, whose life and work are described in self-consciously arch observations.

He’s excellent on the way that Bowie sang about, and celebrated, life rather than death, belying the idea that his magisterial final album Blackstar was merely a piece of ‘death art’. When it comes to Blyton, however, he retreats either into the well-worn (‘every Famous Five book is sunlit – pleasingly bright and reliable, reassuring and happy’) or the eccentric. It is hard to take him seriously when he writes: ‘The closest we get to an embodiment of omniscience in the Famous Five books is Timmy the dog. But Timmy is no God. He is just a god backwards, a form of comic divinity in reverse.’

Royle admits early on that ‘putting Bowie and Blyton together was not my idea’ and the juxtaposition of the two former Beckenham residents never coheres as a thesis. When he writes of the pair that ‘they share a love of music, circus and theatricality, acting and disguise, cross-dressing and class-crossing’, he could be describing virtually anyone in English cultural history. Why not publish a book about George Eliot and Elton John, or Charles Dickens and Danny La Rue for that matter? Some of his weakest writing seeks to justify the connection. ‘Another book in Bowie’s top 100 is Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. Bowie and Blyton are both outsiders’ – this, I’m afraid, will not wash.

The irritation is that, amid the laboured puns and clever-clever allusions (referring to the Oedipus Complex as the ‘son machine’ made me want to throw the book across the room), Royle offers a genuine revelation about Blyton that will be invaluable for her future biographers. His grandmother, Lola Onslow, was an artist who illustrated Blyton’s 1924 title The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies; the two were also lovers, presumably during the period of Blyton’s strained first marriage to Hugh Pollock. Yet even this detail is buried beneath an avalanche of academic-speak and half-fictionalised passages of memoir.

Both Bowie and Blyton were frightened, and fascinated, by the idea of insanity. Bowie’s half-brother, Terry, a paranoid schizophrenic, killed himself, and Blyton’s fear of losing her mind was eventually justified when she developed dementia towards the end of her life. Perhaps it is a compliment to both to suggest that, for all its insights and provocations, Royle’s book is quite the most barking mad ever written about either figure. Musing on his own mental health at one point, Royle writes: ‘I used to worry that people thought I was wacko.’ Judging by this book, their concerns may well have been justified. Still, I suspect that Bowie – the man who put both Viz and The Waste Land into his 100 favourite reads – would have admired the eccentricity and loopy chutzpah, even if Blyton would have been regally unamused.