Gary Marshall Magnus Mills’ first novel, The Restraint Of Beasts, uncovered the sinister underbelly of rural England, as a team of feckless fencers found themselves drawn into a Kafkaesque nightmare. In All Quiet On The Orient Express, Mills tells the tale of an innocent holidaymaker who, erm, finds himself drawn into a Kafkaesque nightmare that […]
Iain Banks: The Business
Gary Marshall Noam Chomsky was right, and Bill Hicks was a visionary. While we’re all distracted by politics, the world is actually being controlled by an unelected and unaccountable organisation with the power to make or break entire nations. The premise of Iain Banks’ latest novel will delight conspiracy theorists everywhere. Kate Telman is a […]
William Gibson : All Tomorrow’s Parties : Waiting For The Man
Antony Johnston has a meeting of minds with the elusive William Gibson about his new novel All Tomorrow’s Parties William Gibson needs no introduction. But he’s going to get one anyway. Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ visualising a worldwide communications net eleven years before the World Wide Web was born. His debut novel Neuromancer won […]
Chester Himes : Lesley Himes: A Life Of Absurdity : Life After Chester
Mark Ostrowski meets Lesley Himes, widow of the late, great Chester Himes Women without men: María survived Borges; Linda Lee, Bukowski; Mary, Hemingway; and Lesley, Himes. Women who dealt with their husbands’ blindness, alcoholism, mental disorders, strokes. Women who now control the reproduction of their late husbands’ work, their copyright. I was ruminating on the […]
J.G. Ballard : Crash : Prophet With Honour
David B. Livingstone on why J.G. Ballard is one of the most vital writers of the 20th century “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!” It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G. Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many have […]
J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights
David B. Livingstone There’s something wrong with Estrella Del Mar, the lazy, sun-drenched retirement haven on Spain’s Costa Del Sol. Lately this sleepy hamlet, home to hordes of well-heeled, well-fattened British and French expatriates, has come alive with activity and culture; the previously passive, isolated residents have begun staging boat races, tennis competitions, revivals of […]
Ethan Coen: Gates Of Eden
Gary Marshall Ethan Coen is one half of the deranged Coen Brothers, responsible for heights of cinematic lunacy including Saddam Hussein in a Busby Berkeley musical, attacks by squeaky-voiced German nihilists and Steve Buscemi in a wood-chipper. If you sat stony-faced through any of the Coen Brothers’ films (Fargo, Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski, The […]
Andrew O’Hagan: Our Fathers
Gary Marshall For anybody who read his first book, The Missing, it’s no surprise that Andrew O’Hagan has written a novel. While his debut book was non-fiction, its vivid evocation of O’Hagan’s childhood in Ayrshire and Glasgow and his poignant tales of the parents of missing children felt like a gripping thriller instead of limp […]
Bruce Robinson: The Peculiar Memoirs Of Thomas Penman
Gary Marshall In one of his routines, Eddie Izzard explains why supermarkets don’t have toilet rolls on display near the entrance in case you think “this is a poo shop! Everything in here is poo!”. Your first impression of The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman may well be similar, as the first chapter revels in […]
Steven Kelly: The War Artist
Gary Marshall Steven Kelly is the editor of online UK literary magazine The Richmond Review and, being mature professionals, we were looking forward to sticking the knife into this, his fourth novel. All in the name of highbrow literary criticism, of course. Unfortunately for us, The War Artist is great. Although the plot initially seems […]
Victor Olliver: Farce Hole
Gary Marshall Citron Press has, perhaps unfairly, been derided as a vanity publisher. Billing itself as a writers’ collective and endorsed by none other than Martin Amis, the company certainly charge prospective authors considerably less than the average vanity company and do seem to make an effort to market their books. It’s difficult to be […]
Richard Dooling: Brainstorm
Gary Marshall One of the biggest publishing success stories of the last decade has been the legal thriller where bright young turks defend truth, justice and the American way. Attorney-turned-novelist Richard Dooling has obviously spotted this and, with Brainstorm, attempts to bring some new life to the genre. In addition to the usual legal shenanigans […]
Alex Garland : The Beach : Backpacker Blues
Nancy Rawlinson finds out why The Beach author Alex Garland is still unsure of his writing success No matter where you go on this small planet of ours, you will encounter ‘Garland’s Law.’ That is, for every 10 people under the age of thirty that you meet, approximately 3.33 per cent of them will have […]
Richard Beard: Damascus
Gary Marshall Do you remember the Fighting Fantasy books? Computer games for people whose parents wouldn’t buy them a computer, each page of a Fighting Fantasy book would end with a number of choices. If you wanted to attack the skeleton with a sword you would turn to page 33; if you wanted to scream […]
Irvine Welsh: Alan Warner: Queerspotting: Homosexuality in contemporary Scottish fiction: Queerspotting
Zoe Strachan drags Irvine Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of the closet… Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electric tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. But […]
Ben Elton: Blast From The Past
Gary Marshall If you’ve read any of Ben Elton’s previous books, you know more or less what to expect. A bit of unfunny comedy, cardboard characters and some lame political comment presented in fifty-foot letters of fire. Previously Elton shocked the world by suggesting that pollution was maybe not A Good Thing; this time round […]
Irvine Welsh: Filth
Gary Marshall When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked cultural event, Irvine Welsh was described as a spokesman for a generation and the most exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language and setting was something of a novelty first time round, Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits […]
Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess: Stardust
Antony Johnston Neil Gaiman once told a group of schoolchildren, “When I was your age, people told me not to make things up. Now I get paid to do it.” And at first glance Stardust seems to be a book for just that audience. A compilation of what was originally a four-issue series, this is […]
Alan Moore: Voice Of The Fire
Antony Johnston Voice of the Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel. But Moore has been writing for as long as this reviewer can remember. Starting with the odd Future Shock and Time Twister for 2000AD, his radically original subject matter and unashamedly emotional style soon led to serial commissions, the most famous being the award-winning […]
Magnus Mills: The Restraint Of Beasts
Gary Marshall As a general rule, the more hype that surrounds a book the bigger the disappointment when you finally get to read it. And The Restraint Of Beasts has certainly been hyped. Nominations for the Booker Prize notwithstanding, we have been inundated with tabloid stories of the rags-to-riches variety describing how Magnus Mills wrote […]
Ian Rankin: Dead Souls
Gary Marshall Most police thrillers conform to a strict blueprint – a misunderstood outsider who’s willing to risk his career and his life to get his man, villains who are inevitably the personification of evil and of course a bevvy of beautiful women with a truncheon fixation. Everything is presented in stark black and white […]
Nikos Kazantzakis : The Last Temptation Of Christ : Always Thirsty
Lewis Owens on the uphill path of Nikos Kazantzakis Although many people may have heard of the novels Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which have been adapted into films, it appears that few are so familiar with the name of the author, Nikos Kazantzakis. Although a national hero in […]
Luke Sutherland: Jelly Roll
Gary Marshall Irvine Welsh has a lot to answer for. In much the same way as British gangster movies made everyone associate the east end of London with long coats, guv’nors and shootahs, Scotland is now inextricably linked with drugs, swearing and psychopaths. With a glut of Trainspotting wannabes hitting the shelves over the last […]
Astro Teller: Exegesis
Chris Mitchell Exegesis is a novel written in the form of email messages between its two major protagonists, Alice Lu and EDGAR. However, Astro Teller’s debut novel is not a digital bodice-ripper, despite the jacket blurb proclaiming Exegesis to be the story of “sex, lies and cyberlove in the year 2000”. Instead, it hinges on […]
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under: An essay on the 10th anniverary of his death
Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death ‘Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact occur.’ (Borges) Like Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, the novelist, playwright and poet, died young. At this end of the century, 58 is young. […]
