Robin Askew If Howard Marks is Mr. Nice – a lovable, educated former cannabis smuggler who didn’t touch anything harder on principle – then Zachary Swan was Mr. Somewhat-Less-Nice. A harder sell to the liberal middle-classes than Marks’s entertaining raconteur, Swan was an American cocaine smuggler whose meticulous scams became the stuff of legend in […]
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz
Stephen Mitchelmore (Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car crash on 14th December 2001). In its official press release, the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature praised VS Naipaul, the 2001 recipient, for "works that compel us to see the presence of […]
Neighbourhood Threat: On Tour With Iggy Pop – Alvin Gibbs: The Song Of Leonard Cohen – Harry Rasky
Chris Mitchell Tour diaries have a particular squalid glamour all of their own. First person accounts of frequently excessive life on the road have become a mini-genre within the slew of books about pop music, Hammer Of The Gods and Pamela Des Barres’ I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie being two of its […]
Paul Wilson: Someone To Watch Over Me
Budge Burgess There is an implied truism that bereavement is something which happens suddenly, usually unexpectedly, leaving the bereaved to discover appropriate coping mechanisms and survival skills. But, as Paul Wilson demonstrates in Someone to Watch Over Me, bereavement can be insidious, slowly defrauding the individual of opportunity and potential. Wilson employs the massacre of […]
Jennifer Niven: The Ice Master
Budge Burgess Stories of polar exploration and survival are apt to locate themselves along a rigid, north-south axis – man versus the elements, heroism overcoming fear, the triumph of human endeavour over adversity. Jennifer Niven finds heroism aplenty in the disastrous, 1913 ‘Karluk’ voyage to the Arctic – not least in Bartlett, the ship’s captain, […]
John Clay: Maconochie’s Experiment
Budge Burgess Given the enduring capacity of English and Scottish courts to sentence large numbers of men and women to prison, it may seem that a book about 19th century penal reform has missed the boat. John Clay’s Maconochie’s Experiment is a reminder that many of the founding fathers, and mothers of the English-speaking world […]
Joy Hancox: Kingdom For A Stage
Budge Burgess This is a curiously enigmatic book, a detective story which remains unsolved… or at least unresolved. Joy Hancox explores the nature of the Elizabethan stage, raising searching questions about its nature and function, sucking the reader deeper and deeper into her research. The stage plans Hancox acquired in 1984 were 17th architectural drawings […]
Andrew Goodman: Gilbert and Sullivan’s London
Budge Burgess When General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, complained that ‘the devil has the best tunes’, he meant the sensual, drunken pleasures of the working class pub and music hall, not the elegant appeal of Gilbert & Sullivan. Yet Arthur Sullivan’s light operas deliver enduring, popular tunes, and the words of W.S.Gilbert embody […]
J.G. Ballard: Rushing To Paradise
Marcos Moure J.G. Ballard’s latest psychodrama is an intensely raw, tense, and bloodied tale of extremes set in the mythical “paradise” of Saint-Esprit, a desolate atoll somewhere in the South Pacific. The novel is thinly veiled as an adventure story as seen through the eyes of its narrator, 16-year old Neil Dempsey. This is no […]
Clark Blaise: Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming And The Creation Of Standard Time
Jonathan Kiefer For the chief engineer of a national railroad company, especially one so industrious as Sandford Fleming in 1876, misreading a timetable – and thereby missing a train – was especially irksome. Fleming redressed this embarrassment with the most enduring achievement of the Victorian era. He invented Standard Time. We of the Information Age […]
David Markson: This Is Not A Novel
Stephen Mitchelmore There’s always someone telling us that the novel is dead. And that is how it should be. As well as offering us the chance to laugh at the fools who parrot this announcement, it makes us ask, for the umpteenth time: what is the novel for, exactly? The question should not be answered […]
Miranda Seymour: Mary Shelley
Budge Burgess The story of Mary Shelley and her invention, Frankenstein, is one of the great romantic tales of literature. At 16, she ran off with the poet, Shelley. At 18, she was challenged to write a chilling story during a famously Gothic storm. Her creation was to be absorbed into the English language as […]
Richard Holland: Nero: The Man Behind The Myth
Budge Burgess Interest in Roman history is an ironic perennial, blossoming with each Hollywood blockbuster – Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, Gladiator. Romans appreciated the mass appeal of the spectacle, now available on celluloid with reassurance that no animal was harmed in its making. Nevertheless, few could name a single Roman – Pontius Pilate was, Spartacus […]
Michael Gira: The Consumer And Other Stories
Jordon Leigh Bortle Although his first book, author Michael R. Gira is by no means unfamiliar in expressing the veiled isolation and profound mortality of the human condition in extremis. Since 1982, Gira has been best known for his work in the medium of music as the vision and driving force behind the proto-industrial/post-punk group […]
Gilles Deleuze: Proust And Signs
Stephen Mitchelmore This isn’t a new book. The French original was published in 1964 and in English eight years later. But don’t dismiss it as out-of-date. Like the book it analyses, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it pitches the reader into the future with a rare vigour. Buy this re-issue and give your […]
Tania Glyde: Junk DNA
James Marsland Any work of dark prophecy reminds you of the inescapable shadow cast by George Orwell and 1984. That the TV phenomenon of last year should have been called Big Brother reminds you how much its ideas have entered the cultural lexicon. Others like "Room 101" and "doublespeak" have also lingered on long since […]
Peter Ackroyd – London: The Biography
Chris Hall Those who have read Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem will recall that the word golem comes from the medieval Jewish for an artificial human being brought to life by supernatural means, a “thing without form”. Ackroyd’s latest book, London: The Biography, has itself managed to breathe life into a seemingly […]
Jeff Noon: Cobralingus
Antony Johnston START > INLET Welcome to the review of Jeff Noon’s latest book, Cobralingus. DRUG: HYPERBOLIN > ENHANCE Jeff Noon’s latest masterpiece, the work of literate beauty that is Cobralingus, takes the reader on an unparalleled journey; one which will never be forgotten. This exemplary poetry, finely encapsulating the very essence of language, ensures […]
James Ellroy: American Tabloid
Richard Pendleton The reader always mainlined crime fiction in front of the TV. He picked up the book. He rubbed his chin. The bristle made a noise like the crackle of fire spreading through a condo in the background . The reader said "It’s American Tabloid. It’s by James Ellroy." Cynical reader said it was […]
Paisley Rekdal: The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee
David Remy Based upon journals kept during the author’s travels through Asia, the essays in The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations On Not Fitting In read less as a search for family roots than an investigation into how society’s attitudes about race shape cultural identity. According to Rekdal, the daughter of a Chinese […]
Jean-Yves Tadie: Marcel Proust
Stephen Mitchelmore For a short time, I used to stay up most of the night. In the long summer months between school years there was no all-night radio let alone all-night television. To pass time, I would listen to the BBC World Service on poor Medium Wave reception. One night around two in the morning, […]
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay
Miriam McDonald This book, set mostly in the 1940s, begins when Joe Kavalier escapes with the legendary Golem from Nazi-occupied Prague, only to find himself in America with no way to free his family, no matter what he does. Just as America is wide-open for these characters, so Europe closes around their loved ones and […]
Gabriel Josipovici – On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion
Jimmy Tarbuck, the no-nonsense Scouse comedian, was on a chat show a few years ago and was asked what kind of reading he preferred. Without pausing to reflect he said, or rather bellowed, “Pure escapism!” He didn’t elaborate. You wouldn’t expect him to. Actually, he repeated the phrase, perhaps impressed by the sudden acquisition of […]
Andrew Vachss: Dead And Gone
Miriam McDonald Every review I’ve seen of one of Andrew Vachss’ novels talks a lot about the man first. It’s similar to the way James Ellroy is treated in reviews, as though the man is more important than the literature. Certainly both have seen and been involved of things most people only see touched on […]
Anne Rice: Merrick
Miriam McDonald Anne Rice is one of the most important writers of vampire fiction. The impact her novel Interview with the Vampire had is indisputable. If the vampire of the ninetheenth century was the outsider threatening society and the vampire of much of the twentieth century the enemy within our own society (or a by-product […]
