Sitting in a traffic jam this morning and pondering how I much used to enjoy Graham Rawle's Lost Consonants series in the Guardian, while simultaneously chuckling at the puerile pleasure to be had when a Coral betting shop loses the "C" from its sign, put me in mind of an old joke in which Robert E Howard's brooding Cimmerian muscle-man from a prehistoric time of wonder that never was becomes, by dint of losing a letter, Onan the Barbarian, who wields his weapon like no other. Crom indeed.
What, I wondered, might the world of literature have been like had other famous works of literature misplaced a consonant or vowel here and there? Might we have had Flaubert's Madame Ovary, in which a pretty doctor's wife escapes her drab world by renting her womb out to less fortunate families?
Or how about Louisa May Alcott's Little Omen, in which the idyllic Massachusetts childhood of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy is suddenly ruptured when their mother gives birth to her first boy, young Damien March...
What sort of hostelry might Mark Twain's Huckleberry Inn have been? Maybe one in which a gentleman of colour might procure a drink while on the run from plantation owners, before continuing along the Mississippi river to freedom?
Still on a watery theme, I like the idea of Three Men in a Boa, especially the trio that Jerome K Jerome might have dreamed up, based upon himself and a couple of well-regarded pals. A man who was to become a senior manager at Barclays cavorting with a feather boa big enough to wind around three grown men has a certain contemporary appeal. And, in the words of the book's sub-title, that's To Say Nothing of the Do... presumably the "do" to which the three men were going, so glamorously accessorised.
Evelyn Waugh's comic novel of mistaken identity in the pigeon-fancying world would, of course, be the triumph that is Coop. Or perhaps it's a paen to the Co-operative Society's ethical banking systems and rather good corner-shop food deals.
I also like the light relief that might have come from Albert Camus's The Plage, as medical workers overwhelmed by an epidemic grab some much-needed r'n'r down at the beach.
And before handing the baton over to anyone who can come up with better examples than those that presented themselves to me on my slow drive into work, I think I would have enjoyed the postmodern story of the members of the family who, over several generations, make lonesome pilgrimages into the Latin American jungle to chop off a lughole, should Gabriel García Márquez have ever written One Hundred Ears of Solitude.
