IIf you just want to be gently charmed for a few hours, The Hotel Avocado will sweep you away. As a comedian, Bob Mortimer spins a hair-raising tale like no other, and this is a rollicking tale of the old school. It’s full of great expressions (“dirty limpets,” “corned beef,” “custard drink”) and hilarious narrative dead ends. Does the plot cohere? Strictly speaking, not! Are the characters in any way real? Not really! Do any of these things matter to the overall sense of fun? Well, if they did, it would be petty to say so when Mortimer is having so much fun. If you enjoyed his first novel, The Satsuma Complex, you’ll probably have a good time, too.

Sequels are notoriously difficult, and Mortimer deals with this by summarizing the events of the previous novel in delightfully silly sentences: “You’ll probably remember that my ex-boyfriend Tommy Briggs shot me in the hip just before he killed himself on the back lawn of the house where he’d locked me up. Well… I’m 99% back to normal now.”

“Normal” is never the word that springs to mind when thinking of Mortimer’s work: The Hotel Avocado is both totally affable and truly mad. We return to the world of paralegal Gary, his girlfriend Emily, elderly neighbour Grace, dog Lassoo, wild animals, corrupt cops and gangsters. Move the setting from south-east London to Brighton, swap the talking squirrel for a talking pigeon, throw in a giant fibreglass avocado and we’re on our way to more of, basically, the same. The book is mostly narrated by Gary, with occasional cameos from Emily, Grace and the mysterious talking stranger who watches them from (under) a park bench. Emily has moved to Brighton to run a hotel. Gary stays in Peckham, where he is threatened by the disturbing Mr Sequence: Gary is due to give evidence in a corruption trial and Mr Sequence would rather he didn’t. From there, the plot spirals on, largely out of control and completely unbelievable. Or is it?

As fans of his panel appearances will know, with Mortimer the unbelievable is very often true. “The situation in my mouth is that I have a very long piece of teeth,” for example; or “I once set fire to my house with a box of fireworks.” Mortimer inhabits a world of sentences and situations that sound like obvious nonsense but are entirely accurate. His subject is actually always the madness of the mundane, and it is in his most detailed depictions of the mundane that this novel works best: an overzealous barista listing coffee roasts from light-light to dark-dark and everything in between; an evil henchman outside a cell door watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on a laptop while his victims struggle against their bonds; a tenant obsessed with nonexistent humidity as some kind of surreal reflection of grief.

And the parts that ultimately ring truest are the parts that ring most bizarre: the talking squirrel as a reflection of Gary’s loneliness, or Emily’s devotion to hoisting a five-foot-long avocado on a hotel flagpole as a culmination of her complex feelings for her late, estranged father. There is something very sweet in the way Mortimer writes about people, their feelings, and the strange things they do because of their feelings: a real tenderness toward the world and the stories in it. You sense that Mortimer really watch out to life. This is how you end up collecting the kind of stories he is famous for.

But telling a story is not the same as writing a novel. Mortimer’s attention serves him well as a writer, but he can’t quite get into his characters: he’s always Bob Mortimer doing a little something. As a comedian, as a storyteller, and now as a novelist, the man loves to gently catch his audience off guard. You constantly feel like you’re being gently and tenderly poked fun at. Bad guys get shot and shout “Aaghh! It hurts so much!” Good guys shout “Viva tomatoes!” as a battle cry. Instead of a proper conclusion, a pigeon comes along to explain what happens to the characters for whom Mortimer forgot to write endings (no, really). “Sorry, but yes, there is an open ending,” the pigeon waves off, “and if that bothers you, then send your complaint to the nearest harbormaster.”

Would it be… a bad book if it was written by an amateur? Would it be a good book if it was written by a popular comedian? Is this another celebrity rip-off to get a place in the book charts, or a sophisticated, sweet, silly meta-commentary on thrillers? When reviewing graphic novels, does it matter whether it’s the “comic” or the “novel”? And most importantly, does any of that even matter if you’ve had a good time?