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I'm about halfway through at the moment - the taxi ride. The book is remarkable for the amount of physical humour; I sometimes feel that I am watching a Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd film.
There is the repeated making of extraordinary noises, as in
"he began speaking almost in a shout, with a tremolo imparted by unshared laughter"
"he threw back his head, filled his lungs, and let loose a loud and prolonged bray of rage"
"he threw back his head and gave a long trombone-blast of anarchistic laughter"
The repeated making of peculiar facial expressions, or imagined facial expressions:
"...tried to flail his features into some sort of response to humour. Mentally, however, he was making a different face and promising himself he’d make it actually when next alone. He’d draw his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retract his chin as far as possible, all this while dilating his eyes and nostrils. By these means he would, he was confident, cause a deep dangerous flush to suffuse his face."
"Dixon knew that before the journey ended he’d find his face becoming creased and flabby, like an old bag, with the strain of making it smile and show interest and speak its few permitted words, of steering it between a collapse into helpless fatigue and a tautening with anarchic fury."
"He pushed his tongue down in front of his lower teeth, screwed up his nose as tightly as he could, and made gibbering motions with his mouth."
"He found himself wanting to make the kind of face or noise he was accustomed to make when entrusted with a fresh ability-testing task by Welch ... He wanted to implode his features, to crush air from his mouth, in a way and to a degree that might be set against the mess of feelings she aroused in him: indignation, grief, resentment, peevishness, spite, and sterile anger, all the allotropes of pain."
That is extended in his drawing of the face on the cover of Johns' magazine.
There are the violent fantasies of his responses to some characters, especially Welch:
"He pretended to himself that he’d pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice, and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet-paper."
"nor did he, on the whole, now intend to tie Welch up in his chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a bottle until he disclosed why, without being French himself, he’d given his sons French names"
The description of the sensation of passing out drunk is wonderful.
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