‘Humbug’ by John Hughes is the new multifaceted novel by the notorious Sydney rip-off merchant. Once again Hughes has successfully launched a puzzle-book of spot-the-author, without listing all the answers at the end. Whole paragraphs from famous American novels and Nobel Prize essays rub shoulders with original writings by his former students and unusual uncredited passages from people’s blogs. Asked to explain himself, Hughes replies smilingly that there is nothing to explain. He is paying homage to all the favourite creative artists that make up his patchwork quilt. Acknowledgement is superfluous, given the words are Hughes’s once a few alterations are made and, as Charles Dickens once put it, “the ink has dried.” An important aspect of his method is the technique he calls “without realising”. This involves copying sections of ‘A Christmas Carol’ without realising at the time that’s what he’s doing. This is quite an imaginative feat, completely beyond the scope of Artificial I...