As imagined by playwright and writer Snoo Wilson, however, this is far from the po-faced apologia you might come expecting. Instead this funny and rather wonderful book is a free-ranging voyage through the mind of the great magus as he sits in his dotage, contemplating a magickal past from his lair... in Hastings, ‘the Elba of the south coast’. The ‘Post-Christian Messiah’, this scourge of the Beaverbrook newspapers, hunted by the Establishment for the three B’s – ‘Buggery, Beastiality and Black Magic’ – is something of a contradiction. Here is a reputation built on wickedness supreme, and yet Wilson’s Beast is at pains to excuse himself from the death of his disciple Loveday.

What Wilson’s rather suburban magus pushes, it seems, is a diabolical (more often a small ‘d’ than not) libertarianism. The book, ostensibly written just after WW2, is a curious mix of priapic scatology (‘hot purple knobs pulsing, yearning clits, and imagination temporarily dulled and made vacant by 24 hour Crowleyvision’) and ribald humour. What it never is is pornographically tiresome.

Crowley travels with his extended family to the magickal Sicilian community at Cefalu, and their eventual expulsion in the face of Mussolini’s jackboot. He publishes a banned novel, contemplates his own lottery, and muses on the mundanity of absolute authority. ‘No one who has not tried to start a new religion,’ he writes, ‘will appreciate the sheer administrative burden which goes with the job.’ Along the way Yeats, ‘Traitor and Smut Peddler’ DH Lawrence, Ruskin and Dennis Wheatley fall beneath his fiendish hoof.

Throughout Wilson sees fit to switch typefaces and lavish his text with copious and often hysterical footnotes. The Beast’s various illustrations have been recreated, the originals having fallen out thanks to Crowley’s ‘belief in the efficacy of his own semen as glue’. Initial copies (666, naturally) have been adorned with ‘a homage to Pan’ by way of a hygienically cured goatskin tail.

I, Crowley is the most fun you’ll have with a British novel all year. Forget state-of-the-relationship addresses and post-colonial self-abuse, this is a natural for the thinking man’s Booker Prize.