Excess and success are one and the same for this ranting anti-hero.
“This is just the book to give to your sister – if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.” wrote the Irish playwright and drunkard, Brendan Behan, of Irish novelist and fellow drunkard Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The same might be said of Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordan’s Fools’ Paradise (hereafter, ”Fitzgerald”, the joint authorship never being explained, though the two have co-authored A History of Alcohol in Australia).
The hero, or anti-hero, or protagonist of this novel is one …

“Wake up, Australia,” Grafton Everest exhorts viewers every morning on Australia-wide breakfast television.
This doesn’t please those he attacks like wily former premier Hoogstraden, whose biography Grafton is forced into writing.
Grafton’s day job as Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality is under threat from the economically and sexually rapacious Vice-Chancellor Deirdre Morrow.
And Lee Horton, head of Australia’s newly privatised Secret Service (trading as SpyForce Australia) is worried too. He knows that Grafton has trouble lying.
And nothing is more dangerous than a man who habitually tells the truth.
Grafton Everest is a wonderful creation …