Ever since I first read it in late 1997, Bad Wisdom by Bill Drummond (formerly of the KLF, amongst numerous other musical adventures) and Mark Manning (of Zodiac Mindwarp) has enthralled me and captured my imagination. It's my honest opinion that it's the best novel ever written. I do not exaggerate there - it's literally the best novel I have ever read. It's better, to my mind, than Wuthering Heights, A Portrait of the Artist, To The Lighthouse, Trainspotting, Sons and Lovers, A Passage To India, A Disaffection, amongst all those novels I read while studying English at university.

Although by two musicians, it's by two of the most imaginative practitioners in the 1980s pop field. Both Drummond and Manning had uniquely postmodern approaches to their pop incarnations, approaches which inform their writing of the novel. Manning's Zodiac Mindwarp, as the name suggests, were a cartoonishly, knowingly OTT metal band, at a time when irony wasn't really part of the rock agenda (with the exception of bands like WASP, where it wasn't always clear). Drummond's KLF were briefly the biggest act in the UK, but were even more peculiar, with a mesh of influences ranging from up-to-the-minute breakbeats, samples, vocal snippets, steel guitar country music, ambient, techno, to dub even, perhaps. Drummond exited the music industry in spectacular fashion at the 1992 Brit Awards, playing an insane version of "3AM Eternal" with the aptly-named Extreme Noise Terror, firing blanks at the terrified record executives at the end of the performance and then leaving a dead sheep at the hotel doorway. He would later burn 1million pounds sterling on the Isle of Jura, with his KLF colleague Jimmy Cauty, and Zodiac Mindwarp manager/road manager/Manning brother-in-law Alan Goodrick, better known as Gimpo.

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Which takes us neatly to the beginning of Bad Wisdom, which is ostensibly the tale of Manning, Drummond and Gimpo making their way to the "North Pole" (actually Nordknapp, the northern-most point of Europe) with a picture of Elvis Presley. It's written in the form of two journals capturing the events as they makes their way northwards and then home again, with a chunk by Drummond following a chunk by Manning, where a chunk might be anything from several pages to a few words. But while Drummond's account of the journey/quest is fairly realistic, apart from several long and inspired rants about Keith Richards, rock music, the inspiration behind his musical career, women and his guilt/misogyny, Manning's is... different.

Manning's is the most lushly literate prose I've ever read, with astonishing metaphors, an incredible imagination, completely over-the-top manner, devastating irony, and a Burroughs-esque ferocious humour. Replete with obsessions about sex, masturbation, homosexuality, "masculinity", and even more sex, it makes Nabokov seem like Hemingway. One can dip into the novel anywhere and come out with a jewel of a phrase:

Manning has no time for simple realism. He takes the basic scenarios Drummond relates and amplifies them into farcical grotesque fantasies, as though seen through an acid trip. And as these accounts intermesh, chunk by chunk, how they relate to each other is source of great humour. For example, where Drummond relates how Keith Richards is "big brother to every boy who has bought an electric guitar in the British Isles after 1965", Manning invents an insanely funny encounter between themselves, Richards and Oscar Wilde. Where Drummond confesses to his guilt and anger about his sexual motives towards women, Manning has a scene where Drummond confesses to being Jack The Ripper (with a wink-wink punchline which completely debunks the misogynistic description of the butchering of a prostitute). And often Manning's imagination spirals into astonishing fervid scenarios, as with the "Sons of the Horned One" which takes in a meeting with a group of "Ice Bikers", a show trial and execution, a typically ironic De Sade-esque rape/orgy which really debunks masculinity, and an apocalyptic placing of the Elvis portrait.

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As seen already, in numerous sections, there is a compulsive sending-up and ironising of notions of masculinity. No doubt taking their cue from "Nordic sagas; ream upon ream of hard-man boasting" and the expectations of male performers in the rock world, they are constantly aware of the performative nature of masculine roles. And they mock this constantly. During Manning's "trial scene", they are invited to execute the condemned men. He depicts Drummond thus:

To which Gimpo responds:

Similarly, when all three of them are captured by "Nazi Kung Fu Sex Bitches with Rottweilers", Manning has a plan: "turn on the snake-oil super charm, fuck her, kill her, rescue Bill and Gimpo, blow up the castle, kill all the women - just like James Bond".

There is a constant tension between an attraction to and repulsion from homosexuality, most pointedly seen when they meet two Chippendales at a party in Helsinki (according to Drummond's account). Manning transposes them into Fabio, "a bronzed god of a man, an Arctic Adonis, a Nordic David, naked, arms folded, standing astride the ley line. He appeared to be carved from sandalwood. His waist-length hair hung in shining tresses upon a muscular torso; an iron jaw, eyes as piercing and blue as those of a desert nomad scouring pyramid horizons; massive knob". The bathetic "massive knob," after the previous poetic clauses, as always undercuts and ironises. At the end of the description of Fabio, Manning informs us that "He radiated a beatific calm and did not seem in the slightest bit homosexual." Wink-wink.

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