Dorothy Johnson Although Laura Hird’s Born Free is quite different in style, it is hard not to think “Trainspotting” when reading it thanks to the narrative’s descent into the squalid underbelly of Edinburgh and the abundance of pop culture references. Four family members live in a broiling hell of ongoing resentments and frustrations within a […]
Keith Altham – No More Mr Nice Guy!
Robin Askew At home with Sting. The in-no-way-narcissistic rainforest dwellers’ friend and tantric sex enthusiast is looking for a space in his sitting room to hang a giant self-portrait. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that this will not match the decor. Eventually, Mrs Sting, Trudie Styler, suggests that it should go in the bathroom in […]
Bernard MacLaverty – The Anatomy School
Dorothy Johnston Bernard MacLaverty’s The Anatomy School is in many ways a familiar rite of passage story of a schoolboy growing up in Northern Ireland in the Sixties. The central character, Martin, attends a Catholic grammar school to which he’s won a scholarship but has failed his exams and must repeat his final year. Since […]
Angela Bourke – The Burning Of Bridget Cleary
Robin Askew Enjoyed The Blair Witch Project? Then immerse yourself in this engrossing and exhaustively researched true story from late 19th century Ireland. The facts of the case are relatively straightforward: in 1895, 26-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. Local rumour claimed that she had been taken by fairies to their […]
Robert Sabbag: Snowblind
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 […]
Simon Garfield : Mauve: How One Man Invented A Colour That Changed The World : Colour Theory
Jonathan Kiefer talks to Simon Garfield about the secret history of chemistry revealed in his book Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World For the subject of his most recent and most popular book, Simon Garfield chose a man whose funeral was fastidiously reported in the periodical “Gas World,” and whose […]
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 : Not A Literary Man
Marcus Moure’s 1995 interview with J.G. Ballard about his novel Rushing To Paradise Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality, or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization, his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced artists […]
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 […]
Bill Hicks : Bad Moon Rising – a tribute of sorts
Even though he’s been dead for seven years, the savage political satire of Bill Hicks makes more sense than ever. Chris Hall spreads the word. If you mention to any intelligent individual under the age of 25 that you saw Nirvana and The Pixies live you’ll get a response along the lines of “you lucky […]
Nick Hornby : How To Be Good : Gender Trouble
Patrick McGuigan talks with Nick Hornby about the changing roles of men and women in his new novel How To Be Good Men stumble through life bewildered by relationships, terrified of responsibility and unable to articulate their feelings; or so you would think from the characters portrayed in Nick Hornby’s novels. Women are only used […]
The Young Gods : Second Nature : The Sound In Your Eyes
Thierry Brunet calls on Swiss sonic pioneers The Young Gods to elaborate on their new album Second Nature André Breton used to describe Max Ernst paintings as “a collage of originally heterogeneous elements which, put together, form another reality ; enigmatic, gifted with a strength of persuasion rigorously proportional to the violence of the initial […]
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 […]
