I wish I could summarize them in a single paragraph as three interconnected works. But, alas, Mr. Hoban doesn't make it that easy for me. Despite some common elements, and the obvious signature of the author that lets you know at once that this is a Hoban work, these three books require separate treatment. They are individuals that want to be noted as distinct entities.

The protagonist of Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer is Jonathan Fitch, age 28, who has just lost a job and a girlfriend. He is contemplating ending it all at the Piccadilly Underground when along comes Mr Rinyo-Clacton, an opera buff. The impeccably dressed gent offers Fitch a million pounds with a condition attached: Rinyo-Clacton reserves the right to terminate Fitch's life any time after one year from the day the money passes hands. Our less than heroic hero accepts, but after a less then pleasant experience I won't reveal here, he worries about possibly having contracted HIV. This is, of course, Hoban's way of showing us how absurd we can be. Fitch knows he will die after a year, so why worry about HIV? But, Hoban does succeed in also making the reader confront death in a more personal manner, namely that it can and will happen to us, when really we always think it will only happen to someone else.

A great many more strange things happen, some of which draw an elderly psychic and Fitch's ex-girlfriend into the sinister web of Rinyo-Clacton. He, by the way, has a gentleman's gentleman, just as Bertie Wooster had Jeeves. Only in this book, this character is called Desmond, whom Fitch describes as having "hands that look capable of crushing a skull like a walnut." Not quite Jeeves!

Along the way, as these strange, even perverse events unfold, we get a great tour of West London, take a trip on the Eurostat, see Paris, get in contact with Dürer's Melencolia and the famous magic square hanging above her, get a sense of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, and much more that makes life rich for brief moments. As always in a Hoban novel, there are twists and turns that lead to unexpected places and endings. All of this in just 182 pages, and 38 chapters, the work of a skillful writer who royally entertains us in dark and light tones.

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In The Bat Tattoo Russell Hoban takes his readers to the Victoria & Albert Museum where Roswell Clark, an American now living in London, heads to take a look at a happy-looking bat on a Chinese chair cover. Instead, he ends up with a bat on a Chinese bowl. The reason for finding the bat is that he wants to tattoo it on his shoulder to change his luck. In the process he meets Sarah Varley, who already has the identical bat tattooed on her shoulder. As one can expect, their lives become entwined, through the shared bat and shared widowhood, middle age and the resulting needs, through art, and a shared London landscape.

The story unfolds through the eyes of these two in alternating chapters, the story told from two points of view. There is, however, an interloper in this alternating tale. The third voice belongs to Adelbert Delarue, a man with considerable amounts of money and highly unusual tastes.

Roswell is an inventor, an inclination he inherited from his dreamer of a father, who died by wrapping his car around a tree when the son was still a boy. Roswell becomes obsessed with crash test dummies. This leads him to so invent a children's game called Crash Test. It allows a constantly repeating accident in which the resulting bits and pieces can be easily put back together again. Unfortunately, computer games eventually surpass the interest in his game, and he has been unable to come up with a new invention. Then a letter arrives from Delarue, admitting his admiration for the Crash Test game, and an offer for a very specific commission that assures him "that you will be well recompensed for the exercise of your most interesting talent."

Roswell accepts and so we are once again taken on a most unusual journey that involves art, music, woodcarving, Hoban's obsession with German art and literature. He drops names of artists and book titles of the past here and there like parts of the crash dummies for us to put them into place again. Hoban again twists his tale into unexpected shapes, infusing them with hints of religion, and giving us much to think about, while also entertaining us.

One gets the feeling that he also mocks current art tastes with the likes of Damien Hirst in mind and his mentor, Charles Saatchi, and, of course, the strange 'art' objects chosen by the adjudicators of the Turner Prize. In The Bat Tattoo, the prize is called the R. Albert Streeter Prize. Hoban, of course, is playing with us.

What is so great about this book is that one senses Hoban enjoyed writing it, even if it wasn't exactly an easy thing to do — writing a novel, that is. One knows he may be dropping all those names, but he makes no attempt to impress us with them. So, the reader needs to feel no guilt for having an equal feeling of enjoyment while reading.

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Russell Hoban, having reached the early winter of his age (he turned 81 on Feb. 4, 2006) when Come Dance With Me was published in 2005, has for the second time turned to characters of a more mature age than in the early days of his long writing career. Come Dance With Me might be called an autumnal love story.

The title derives from a line in an eerie poem by Johann Gottfried Herder, Erlkönig's Tochter (Erlking's daughter) set to music by Carl Loewe in 1821. The actual line in the poem, repeated in several stanzas, is "tritt tanzen mit mir". It translates as "step in to dance with me", but who is going to quibble over such a minor transgression? I don't know the ballad, so perhaps Loewe made changes to fit his composition. Let it suffice to say that J.W. Goethe liked Herder's poem enough to use it as the basis for his poem, Erlkönig. It was Goethe, long associated with Herder, who said something along the line of: 'immature artists imitate; mature artists steal.'

In Come Dance With Me, the two protagonists, Christabel Alderton and Elias Newman, meet at an art exhibit of the Royal Academy of Arts. How can it ever be anything else but that art will take a focal point in the lives of Hoban's heroes? This time the painting that attracts the two characters from very different backgrounds is Cyclops by the French painter and illustrator Odilon Redon.

Once again Hoban unfolds the tale of these two protagonists through the alternating telling of their stories, with a several other voice briefly thrown in now and then. Again we have 38 chapters, some of which are barely a page in length.

There are those marvelous moments of traveling through London, of hopping into London cabs, meetings in well known pubs and those not so well known. We perceive of Christabel and Elias forming a kind of mating dance, if that is what one can all it when both partners are past the age of 50. What Hoban shows us here is that love can be found at any age, and that not only the young can fall in love, or need love.

While in The Bat Tattoo Hoban took his characters by train to Paris, in Come Dance With Me they fly to Hawaii — or more correctly to the Hawaiian island of Maui. What wonderful memories his story elicits for the reader who has traveled there. Of course, for Christabel, the memories are not so happy; I will forgo giving the reasons for that, however, because I do not care to reveal too much of the plot.

Odelin Redon's Cyclops