Anti-hero, and a would-be lover whose longing turns him into a buffoon: Prokopiev’s book is, surprisingly, a very English type. Heir to Shakespeare’s Bottom, Henry Fielding’s trickster Tom Jones, and even Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, he could also share a pint or two with the deprecating genii loci of today’s British poetry: Alan Brownjohn’s Ludbrooke, Christopher Reid’s Mr Mouth or one of Hugo Williams’s frank self-portraits. But Peeper also belongs to the wider family of “the little man”, struggling under a weight of circumstance he has no notion how to negotiate. Living among, without managing to live by, conventions, the Peeper is a descendent of that wry Everyman who has suffered and been compromised since mediaeval times. He is a Good Soldier Svejk, a Charlie Chaplin, more than he is a Humbert Humbert or an Alexander Portnoy.
