http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2347251.html

It's a fore-runner to Tristram Shandy, published three years earlier, with a lot of the same characteristics - rambling anecdotes, vaguely Irish background. Yet there is also quite a tight structure: our hero, John Buncle, keeps falling in love with beautiful and intelligent women, who then all die tragically (in a manner reminiscent of Spın̈al Tap's drummers) enabling him to move onto the next one.

With each chapter he delves deep into some aspect of intellectual life - about half the time it's theology, where Buncle (and presumably his author) have very strong Unitarian views, and one can more or less tell whether a character is good or bad depending on their attachment to the Trinity ("it is a word invented by the doctors, and so far as I can find, was never once thought of by Jesus Christ and his apostles"). But the other half of the time it's natural science, and the author's ability to reshape the latest scientific information into readable form is pretty impressive (though a novel is not where we would present such information today). There are particularly good sections on geology (with deep anxiety about the Abyss) and what we would now call the chemical elements. It's all heavily footnotes (I counted at one point a third level of annotation, footnote to a footnote to a footnote).

Although Buncle starts in Dublin, actually most of the book is spent exploring the wildernesses of Westmorland and to a lesser extent North Yorkshire, with excursions elsewhere (he stays in London with Edmund Curll, who was a real person, and encounters various other real people too). The landscape secriptions are particularly good. I can't really recommend it as a novel, but it's a fascinating case of what happened when an eccentric eighteenth-century gentleman sat down one day and decided that he was going to write a story. ( )

A novelist who was off his rocker. Colin Wilson called Amory the only insane English novelist. Hard to be sure about this. A trip through Peter Ackroyds book will leave you wondering, just a little, about "The Sparkler" though. And Dan Simmon's DROOD is about nothing else. ( )

”… I have been reading a most curious romance-like work, called the Life of John Buncle, Esq. 'Tis very interesting, and an extraordinary compound of all manner of subjects, from the depth of the ludicrous to the heights of sublime religious truth. There is much abstruse science in it above my cut and an infinite fund of pleasantry. John Buncle is a famous fine man, formed in nature's most eccentric hour.”-- Charles Lamb to S.T. Coleridge, June 24th, 1797