With hindsight, no surprise that Sam Byers wrote Perfidious Albion (which I enjoyed last year) given the first demonstration of his Weltanschauung in this novel, his debut work. Byers is great — if a little heavy-handed in his satire, with the remit of his criticism extending across holier-than-thou liberals, eco-warriors, internet celebrities, and more in Idiopathy. His key contention seems to be that many of us are stuck in a form of myopia, an inability to see the bigger picture and to extrapolate from the personal to the general. It is this failing, perhaps, that prevents either of the main protagonists from being truly happy; what they want and what they need are two very different things. The bovine (stupor) metaphor is a good one in this work, and Byers generally has some very good and clever ideas. I would have preferred it had he developed them with a little more subtlety, but he almost/mostly gets away with it simply because Idiopathy is a humorous — and zeitgeisty — novel. 8/10.
By Sam Byers