My Little Blue Dress is certainly unique. It is structured in roughly three parts.

At first we appear to be getting the life story of an elderly woman. She is recalling her childhood in Northern England at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unfortunately it's not a very good autobiography. In fact it's unbelievable - the characters talk and act in a way that is totally unconvincing and even some simple factual details are wrong.

After about 75 pages of this we are told - in case we haven't already guessed - that the autobiography is a fake. As it continues, we learn through side notes that it is being written not by the old lady but by her next door neighbour and carer, confusingly called "Bruno Maddox" (For this book review I'll call the "real life" Bruno Maddox "Maddox" and the character "BM"). We are given a number of unpleasant hints as to why BM is faking this work.

About half way through the book, BM gives up trying to fake an autobiography and instead decides to write the old lady's diary, interspersed with flashbacks to her youth. Most of the diary entries are, of course, about BM and through these we learn about his sad lonely life.

Towards the end, BM abandons any pretence of writing as the old lady. We are now reading his diary first hand. Everything comes to a head with a final encounter where we learn the real truth - with a twist that I admit surprised me.

It sounds great and there are definitely some interesting ideas here. Unfortunately it doesn't work.

One problem Maddox has is that it's very difficult to distinguish between a good parody and a bad original. The "autobiography" section is intended to be funny. Yes, it's amusing in places, however more often than not it's just plain annoying. In particular the fake Northern dialect is funny for about two sentences. Similarly the diary section is sometimes funny, more often than not irritating. It would work better if BM had any understanding of subtlety.

What really undermines this book is Maddox's extreme self-indulgence. The most obvious case is his giving the fictional narrator the same name as himself. Gosh, how very post-modern, I'm so impressed. This is symptomatic of much of the book. The writing keeps shouting "look at me, I'm so clever".

The whole thing becomes untenable when we learn that BM is himself a frustrated author, an old cliché that really annoys me. Maddox uses this, of course, as an excuse for some in-jokes concerning the world of writing and publishing. He is also unable to resist tying himself up in self-referential knots. At one point the fictional BM describes a fictional novel as having "a total lack of value, reader, clever-sounding nonsense spun out to inordinate length." I couldn't help nodding in recognition.

It's a shame that such a good concept has been squandered. The ideas here would easily have supported an excellent novella. In padding the story out to novel length Maddox has shown a lack of self-restraint and a desire to impress that ultimately ruins the book.