Dominic Maxwell: The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs (1975)

This is a mordant suburban fable about the tenacious absurdity of modern life

Last night, just to make sure that The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin really is the book that has affected me most, I dipped back into its 285 pages again. I wanted to see if Reggie, the depressed desserts executive who fakes his own death, still had as much to say to me now that I’m (how did this happen) his age, 46. I wanted to check the catchphrases — “I didn’t get where I am today . . .” “cock-up on the catering front” — still illuminated David Nobbs’ semi-awful yet sympathetic characters in the way they did when I first read and re-read this, aged 12. I wanted to see if Nobbs’ satire still retained the cynical charge that made me first realise the adult world had several screws lose.

Well, 285 pages later, I was still dipping, still laughing, still seeing the world in slightly brighter colours. Though it’s best known for the sitcom it became, and though it is heavy in Nobbs’ distinctively pithy dialogue, it has a darkness and a scope that the television version never equalled. And it is deliciously double-edged. What does this rebel without a clue do with his new life? He edges back, incognito, into his old life. “We can never escape our destiny, he realised, because whatever happens to us becomes our destiny. It had all been a terrible mistake.”

In one or two respects it’s stuck in the mid-1970s: it’s a book about a man’s world, with underwritten female characters. In every other, this is a mordant suburban fable about the tenacious absurdity of modern life. The harder we try to wriggle free from it, the tighter it holds us in its grip.