WHEN THE LID COMES OFF – introducing The Malevich Teapot
In response to the generous comments of readers who saw extracts in various other places, and for the rest of you (which is most of you) who haven’t a clue what this is all about, here, for the first time, is the whole unexpurgated novel: The Malevich Teapot in all its grimy, tannin-stained splendour.
The Malevich Teapot is a seething psychodrama, a savage whimsy, a crass farce. It is set in a modern London of grand houses and seedy cellars, populated by the reincarnated and reinvented likes of William Morris, Robert de Montesquiou, Gustave Moreau, Frederic Leighton, John Hunter, Prince Carlo Gesualdo, Caroline Crachami, John Soane and Gilles de Rais. Into this shadowy world of decadent dandies, dangerous dandies, stumbles Fannings: a 30-something former lecturer with a serious panic problem. Some say he has a vile temper, others that he is a vulnerable young man adrift in a ghastly great metropolis. When the Malevich Teapot – the most mysterious and misunderstood item in the history of tableware – is stolen from an exhibition at Walthamstow Town Hall, all hell breaks loose.
This is an illustrated version of the novel. The photographs are my own work, and although they were not taken with the novel in mind, it is my belief that they complement its many moods.
Chris Blackford
