N. F. Simpson's prose hardly ever deviates into sense. It is a palimpsest of non-sequiturs, a double acrostic of crossword clues. It is also true farce in that it aims to provoke laughter by deceiving us into admitting impossible connections between improbable opposites. But with Simpson, the opposites are ideas as well as persons. He provokes the head-laugh as well as the belly-laugh. His jokes are brain-splitting as well as side-splitting. Once we have made the electric connection between the two poles of his irony, we can no longer refuse to believe in the reality of the circuit. It is the Swiftian conjuring trick performed in the manner of Feydeau.

At least, that was my understanding of Mr. Simpson's aims and methods in [A Resounding Tinkle and The Hole]. Of these, A Resounding Tinkle seemed to hit the target with a resounding wham—the tea-cosy couple in the suburban villa they have never even looked at ('I thought we lived in a bungalow'), with men at the door asking the husband to form a government …, mis-served by shops which send them an elephant instead of the snake they ordered, forced to be an audience for uninvited comedians, with their living-room commandeered by The Critics who patronise the play in which they are compelled to act by the Great Producer out there. This was recognisably, and hilariously, and depressingly, the world lived in by the white-collared neighbours of Arnold Wesker's farm workers in Roots. Mr. Simpson, like Mr. Wesker, Mr. Behan, and perhaps Mr. Pinter too, was giving us the text for today—'Stop being manipulated.'

In One Way Pendulum, N. F. Simpson seems at first to be juggling with the same comical hand-grenades. But too few of them are primed. The homicidal, skeletal son training the I-Speak-Your-Weight machines to sing the Hallelujah chorus; the glum mechanical father carting home sections of a Build-Your-Own-Old-Bailey kit; the gaga aunt in the wheel-chair endlessly planning journeys through space from a celestial Bradshaw; the pneumatic teenage daughter worrying about the simian length of her arms ('I've nothing against apes—as such'); the bulging charwoman who is hired, not to clean up but to eat up ('I'm afraid I haven't touched the gherkins yet'); the matter-of-fact mum who has a comfortable explanation for every incongruity ('He had the cash register just as something to offer in part exchange in case he wanted a typewriter'); these have the old familiar tinkle. While no combination of words picked by the human mind is presumably ever meaningless, Mr. Simpson's combinations here can only unlock the secrets of his own mind—they have little to reveal to us about ourselves. The zaniness is self-consciously, pretentiously worked up for the sake of deliberate disassociation. 'Only disconnect' is now the motto. That way defeatism lies—and the fashionable unpoetry of the beatniks, the modish no-plays of Ionesco, the eventual betrayal of meaning.

It is only fair to Mr. Simpson to say that the second half of One Way Pendulum is a partial return to his earlier style and aims. The Old Bailey has been erected in the drawing-room and the trial of the mass-murderer son begins in his absence. The pedantic barbarity and pettifogging ruthlessness of the law in action is shrewdly and acidly caricatured. The grisly farce of courtroom antics has always appealed to the sense of humour of British intellectuals—ever since Shakespeare convulsed the Elizabethan smart set by the hilarious twist of making Shylock condemned to life-long Christianity. N. F. Simpson brings the satire up to date with the Mr. Tinklebury Snapdriver and the Mr. Honeyweather Gooseboote of 1959…. But as a whole, One Way Pendulum is not a whole. Mr. Simpson is dangerously near being caught in the most dangerous trap for any comic writer—that of being funny about funny subjects.