Lately I’ve been reading the novels of Surtees. He isn’t a big name these days so I’ll just say that he’s a Victorian novelist, as famous for writing about hunting as Trollope is for writing about church politics.

But that isn’t the point. Now that fox-hunting is illegal in the UK, we can leave all of that controversy aside and just say that Surtees is great fun: a comic novelist who writes in a wonderfully relaxed way and is really the heir to eighteenth-century picaresque novelists like Fielding and Smollett.

His subject is the countryside and its characters, and if you happen to like riding horses (as I do) you will love Surtees. If you don’t, and you just want to de-stress with a writer who is as laid-back as they come, then Surtees is your man.

His world is a bit like P.G. Wodehouse’s: an innocent, self-contained world of comic figures who have their own language and habits, where comic disaster is usually close but nothing serious ever happens.

So far I’ve read Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities (dreadful title!), Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and now I’m in the middle of Handley Cross. ‘Sponge’ is especially interesting because Mr Sponge is clearly a psychopath, but presented entirely without criticism and even used as the viewpoint of the novel (something it shares with Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley!)

Sponge invites himself to people’s houses and won’t leave until absolutely forced to; he travels with defective horses which he sells to people, passing them off as superior mounts; he borrows cash all over the place with no intention of repaying it. But (unless you’ve taken a hint from his name) it takes a while to realise what sort of chap Sponge is because the author never says a word against him, just follows him on his way as he manipulates and cons his way around the country houses. He ends up happily married off to a rather dubious lady who, it is hinted, has already had at least two affairs.

And this is what’s amazing about Surtees: that he’s a Victorian novelist without any Victorian humbug. His characters guzzle huge meals, use lots of slang, get drunk, stagger out of bed with terrible hangovers, flirt outrageously and even – according to broad hints, as above – have affairs, without any self-righteous criticism from the author. The books were published in the 1850s and ‘60s, which makes them amazingly outspoken. It’s as if Surtees were still living in the Regency period and hadn’t noticed that Victoria was now on the throne.

Judged on technique, Surtees is a terrible novelist. He has no plot, he just rambles along; he repeats his jokes; if he finds he’s left out some bit of information, he just sticks it in in a footnote. Sometimes he’ll give you a whole episode twice, once in his own words and then in the ‘journal’ of Mr Jorrocks or someone else – probably because Surtees had pages to fill and hadn’t yet thought of a new bit of plot. But it’s all wonderfully relaxing, a total holiday from the 21st century.

There’s more than a hint of Dickens about his comic characterisation and episodic structure, and that’s not surprising because Dickens was asked to write Pickwick Papers specifically as an imitation of Surtees, with illustrations by John Leech who’d done the pictures for Jorrocks. Dickens, of course, took the story off in another direction.

Meanwhile, Surtees (1805-64) answers two questions that had often crossed my mind. (1) What happened to the English picaresque novel after Smollett? and (2) What should I read when I’m fed up with work, stress, emails, Twitter, Facebook and 21st century life generally? Robert Smith Surtees is the answer to both.

If ytou’re already fnatical about Surtees you might be interested in the Society dedicated to him: http://www.rssurtees.com/

And if you want to try one of his books, here are a couple: