Angelica's Grotto

Angelica's Grotto is a pornographic website into which seventy-two-year-old art historian Harold Klein wanders one evening. Klein, a walking catalogue of infirmities known to medical consultants as 'he who declines to hop the twig', may not be up to much physically but there's a lot of sex going on in his head.Russell Hoban takes this premise and shows why he is one of Britain s most startling, original and funniest writers. Harold first visits Angelica's Grotto after losing his 'inner voice', that censoring mechanism that keeps us from blurting out the first reckless thing that pops into our heads. As well as consulting a therapist about this new lack of mental privacy, Harold begins a one-to-one onscreen dialogue with Melissa in the Grotto. 'If I had an inner voice I wouldn't be telling you all this,' he explains. But when the flesh-and-blood Melissa enters his life with her large and well-hung colleague Leslie, Harold finds he needs to keep the angina medicine at the ready. His odyssey takes him not only through erogenous zones but into various corners of the London art world, down the underground and up the buses.