THE GREAT CYPRUS THINK TANK is the second of my metafarcical novels comprising THE ENIGMA QUARTET. It is the only novel in English that portrays the culture and history of Cyprus from a satirical point of view. But the larger target is the damned human race. Though he has a humanitarian motive, the narrator Bart Beasley hopes to gather material for yet another cultural memoir, the genre he is best known for as a miserable midlist author. His dreamworld has fallen flat and he seeks new inspiration in the legendary isle.
He hopes with a passion to find a lost notebook by Arthur Rimbaud, to visit the home of Lawrence Durrell, silently asking the deceased writer to breathe fresh words into him, to stage a performance there of Othello with parts played by professional impersonators of Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and Lawrence and Gerald Durrell. By his own word, Bart Beasley has never fallen in love. This is, of course, my set-up for his falling in love. But with whom I'll not let on here. Or let on to the dark forces that conspire against him. Whether he prevails in the end is for the reader to discover.