Allen Lyne

A Handicap for the Devil Allen Lyne

Jonathan Goodfellow is an accountant. One day God looked down upon the earth and saw that he was meek and mild and thought that it was a good thing. This was the start of the disruption of Jonathan's quiet life and began the series of misadventures that then took place. Misadventures as varied as being hit on the head by a one legged, one eyed dwarf wielding a golf club, dying, meeting God in heaven and being offered the choice of carrying God's message and reforming the human race or going to hell. Jonathan becomes the new Messiah and makes desperate attempts to convince people of his bona fides. Ranged against him are a number of forces that include The Legal Ruler's Society, a group of lawyers who have been in league with Satan for many years and who are plotting to take over the world in the name of evil when the moment is right. Satan, like God, decides to leave human beings to their own ends and offers the world to the lawyers if they leave him alone to fulfil his twenty-year-old ambition to break one hundred and twenty at golf. Satan put the idea of the game into the heads of the Geordies as a means of driving people mad and getting them to do terrible things to one another. Hell has been converted into a golf course and everyone there must play two rounds a day. No one is allowed to break one hundred and twenty on pain of terrible torture. Along the way Jonathan does make converts. Most of them are the poor and downtrodden, the criminal and the insane. The one exception is his main disciple, Marcie Mabelgrove, chief investigative reporter with the Daily Bugle, and love blossoms in Jonathan's lonely life. In all of the mayhem that takes place, there remains the voice of sanity in the form of Jonathan's two white, albino, Himalayan, dwarf rabbits. Bugs and Thumper have been deputised by God as the communication point for Jonathan, and God has granted them the power to speak to Jonathan. Like all rabbits, Bugs and Thumper are practical and down to earth creatures who are not swayed by the tempestuous events around them. The book reaches its climax in the last battle of good versus evil on earth as the evil lawyers, led by the portly, cigar smoking, cask wine drinking, Jones P. senior, battle a group of aged pensioners on the banks of the Murray River.