Said ball catches the reader unawares with it's own language and symbol system used to dissect and understand the cryptic clue.
It's a highly stylised and systemic approach that meets with mixed success. On the plus side, there's an entertaining range of clues on offer here that are deconstructed by Mr Greef in his own unique way. If you follow him through you will gain understanding and insight and your game will improve. In this sense, it really does what it says on the tin.

But his quirky glossary can be a trial. 'Concons', 'condixes', 'bitwords', 'numers', to name but a few, will have you constantly flipping back to the glossary at the end of the book, and this can be an irritation.

But then the offbeat glossary is part of the books usp, its otherworldly charm.

I read most of the book unaware of Mr Greef's personal circumstances, (a Sunday Times article appraised me of that, and there's a coda at the end of the book). That he put together such a complex and entertaining work under the linked problems of manic depression and homelessness.........well, good on yer, mate. Bitwords fall too short.......

However what Mr Greef achieves in explaining the workings of cryptic crosswords is actually epic, if not quite revolutionary.

Believe me I've tried these damned things for many years, mostly spent in abject failure. I've even tried the brand of cheating that involves using books similar to Mr Greef's.

Similar but not the same. For here is a book that is more than a few worked examples and several blind leaps of faith. Here is a book that goes to the principles, that delves into the murky minds of the setters and shows that there is logic and substance trapped within. Above all it is a book that attempts (mostly successfully) to show not so much what to do, but rather, how to do it.

Having read and tried Mr Greef's methods, you come away from the experience with the white light of a Damascene conversion, rather than the rather sordid feeling that in some way you might have been cheating.

A big problem with the book is that it invents its own language for talking about cryptic clues, using exotic terms like "nosek" and "hydration", which make a glossary essential. (Can you guess what hydration is? I'll tell you at the end of the review, and I'm pretty sure you'll guess wrong.) Many of these invented words are not used in other discussions about cryptic puzzles, either because more intelligible alternatives already exist (e.g. "containter and contents" - longer than "concon" but easily understood without a glossary), or because no-one thinks the word is necessary (e.g. "geograph" = a clue requiring geographical knowledge).

Some of the descriptions using this language are pretty impenetrable, in a way that other books manage to avoid. For example, to explain "Poet writes note held by disheartened singer" = SPENSER, all we need is something like:

Clue type: container and contents
Definition: Poet = (Edmund) Spenser.
Wordplay: Writes note = PENS E, all inside: disheartened SingeR = SR, giving S(PENS E)R.

Instead, this clue is a "condix" rather than just a "concon", and is explained thus:
"Both dixes remain once a central dix is removed from singer. This is not a simple one step disheartenment that leaves the answer standing in the form of a partword. The addix is required to construct the answer. Thus we see that the addix is a two step construction (undix, then addix) as all the earlier examples show. One, remove dix from clue. Two, put dix in answer."

Special formatting, to show the structure of clues, is used throughout the book. You never get any unformatted clues to look at, to see whether the book has taught you to analyse the structure of the unformatted clues that appear in real puzzles. Nor do you get any sample puzzles to try, or much advice about where to find puzzles to cut your teeth on. It's a bit like a driving course that never puts you behind the wheel of a car.

There are also several pages of material that contribute very little to the purpose of the book. The table of "differences and similarities in the nomenclature of segments or word parts" could be deleted, and information about topics like the potential palindromic properties of numbers below 196, and the introduction of zero to Western maths, belongs in some other book.

Here's that definition of Hydration: "Insertion of a letter at the head of a word; opposite of beheadment."
(Presumably from the mythical Hydra, which had many heads - but absolutely nothing to do with the normal meaning of "hydration").

Georgia Metcalfe