Is that playful or serious? Comic or tragic? Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines and goddesses into muses’. Into that dichotomy, as a nymph in this novel says, religion drove a wedge, and ‘Christ, who slept with no female…who played no music instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Wild Pan, the embodiment of Nature’s green fuse, represents the dichotomy in our human nature, between the unruly impulses of our desires - for example, susceptibility to the seduction of perfume - and the timid reserve enjoined by the strictures of pious comportment and polite conformity. When Christ was born, they say, the cry went up: ‘Great Pan is dead’, and no wonder that the humourless authoritarians of the church, horse-whipping childish mockery and a propensity to fun with the cured leather of doctrine, identified sulphur-eyed Satan as a revenant of the cloven-footed, horned, shaggy, sulphurous stinky god of panic, a male divinity associated with female values. And Pan, for his ‘pranksterish overturning of decorum…his leer and laughter when we took our blaze of mammal intellect too seriously’. Its cast: a one thousand year-old janitor, a genius Seattle waitress, the proprietress of a New Orleans perfumerie, two old-school French parfumiers, a whacko doctor, founder of the Last Laugh Foundation for the exploration of immortality and brain science. Jitterbug Perfume skips between mediaeval Bohemia, Paris, New Orleans and Seattle. ‘Comic writing is not only more profound than tragedy, it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to write’. Some critics don’t take Tom Robbins seriously despite the persuasive force of his intellectual quick-stepping, his discursus on mysteries of the spirit, his challenge to lazy thought, because he is playful and comic. ‘Quantum physics suggests a universal balance between immutable laws and random playfulness.’

If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.' He says, 'I urge everyone to buy books from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby.

In spring 2019, Thames and Hudson will publish a revised edition of his books on the French Alps. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins