billyfisher1977

'My Idea of Fun' is the most first-novel first novel I have ever read.

Not in that it's badly written (it isn't) but in that it crams every thought and idea that the author has had since he became a sentient being into a plot that just exists so that he can do so.

It's just bursting with digressions, observations and ideas, all pearls threaded along a thin twine of story.

It reads a bit like a motorway pileup of about seven different short stories all mangled together.

It also reads like a three-way collision between Martin Amis, William Burroughs and JG Ballard.

At least I reckon.

Cheers,

Mark

Five Boys isn't really a novel. It's more a scrap book about a small town in Devon and its adventures during the second world war.

It's a bit like a soap opera, in that a situation and characters are set up and then the machine is set in motion, without one clear thread of plot.

When 'Five Boys' comes to an end it is an arbitrary one. It's like Jackson could have continued to write about this little lost world indefinitely.

There's some lovely stuff about men return from war and no longer fitting into their families, stuff about young boys making sense of the world and, in the second half of the book, some lovely agrarian spookiness with the almost supernatural Bee King, who comes to the village and beguiles the boys with his buzzing world.

If you can imagine the darker, more inquisitive cousin of a Sunday night TV drama that swaps nostalgia for scepticism, then 'Five Boys' is it.

It's like Jackson has sat down and listened to the recollections and stories of older relatives, then set to work turning them from codified tales into real living experience, putting in all of the emotional detail that's missing.

Jackson writes well, and with a keen eye for how absurd the world seems through the eyes of a child.

Cheers,

Mark

She's an interesting one, Vivienne Westwood.

One of the respectable post war north western working class, she claims that she realised that she needed to escape from respectability and to keep being offending people, even to the point where it's against the law, because when you do that, you've won and the rewards far outweigh the costs. It's only when you loose your nerve that you end up with nothing.

Fred Vermorel has always had a bit of an odd idea of truth. He's a product of the same milieu as Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the arse-end of sixties art school radicalism. The book is part written as an 'imaginary interview', with Vermorel stitching together things Westwood has said, or might have said.

Reading the book, you realise that punk wasn't the start of the eighties, it was the very end of the sixties, the last gasp of one thing, not the start of another. It pulled together all of the threads that had been hanging unwoven since the late sixties and gave them form: urban terrorism, vice and porn, situationism, rock 'n' roll transcendence, social realism etc

Westwood is like a barometer or wind-sock, being blown by the prevailing winds, responding to things as they happen, to the extent that what she thinks of what she's doing seems at huge odds to what she actually is doing.

It's a good read, and Fred Vermorel is never less than honest about where his tongue is.

Cheers,

Mark

Do you remember the Mardi Gra Experience?

For about four years, one man sent explosive devices to banks, left explosive devices outside of supermarkets and played a cat and mouse with the Metropolitan police...

I spent Thursday morning reading this, tucked up in bed. I learned all about ways to construct easy home made explosive devices, and how you might go about blackmailing major companies.

Bombing campaigns have been a fact of English life for years.

Cheers,

Mark

If you liked the Atrocity Exhibition, then the title story of this collection should be right up your street.

Powers, a surgeon, is building a mandala in the desert, having a condition that will eventually put him into a coma. Each day, he sleeps more until eventually he will not wake up. The universe is dying and entropy is approaching. A man, operated upon so that he never sleeps is stalking powers, leaving him notes each day detailing how long the universe has left...

The Voices of Time also features the story 'The Sound Sweep', which not only inspired Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles, but also contains a device that gave its name to electronic music group Sonovac.

As an aside, I got a previous version of this collection out of the library as a thirteen year old. It a yellowing hardback, called the Four Dimensional Nightmare (it features a couple of Vermillion Sands stories that aren't in Voices of Time). Under the polythene wrapped around it, the cover was a pen and ink drawing of an empty swimming pool. I read it in the concrete and brown wood of Newcastle Central Library, say next the boulders set into the floor as an art piece.

I spent years trying to track the story down afterwards, remembering the blank desert with a few towers and sheds here and there, the hot sun and the man, hefting bags of cement, inescapably running out of time...

Cheers,

Mark

Gibson's short stories are better than his novels I reckon.

There's more emotion and sadness and less action. There's a couple of real corkers in here.

Soviet astronauts in space so long they can never go home...

A virtual reality worker replays and replays the last few moments of a relationship...

A man is haunted by the ghosts of pulp fiction futures that never happened...

Empaths sit and wait for astronauts fired into the blackness of space to come back and try to stop them killing themselves...

Good stuff really. Very early eighties.

Cheers,

Mark

A good read this one, but you can feel the author's interest waning as the twenty century marches on. It's very good up until he gets to Wolfenden, and then he's a bit more like a school child who took to long on the first bits of a project and has to finish the rest the night before it has to be handed in.

There aren't really any greatly developed theories in the book, it's more just a potter through various gay lives with a bit of historical context.

There's some really interesting stuff about the gay worlds of the naughties, tens, teens, twenties and thirties, but there's an over-reliance on a few key texts, especially Maurice by EM Forster and Auden's poetry.

However, stuff about homosexuality, class division and levelling, spying and socialism certainly rang my bell.

This book would make a cracking documentary series.

Cheers,

Mark

I would have read it it but I kept rolling a one.

Cheers,

Mark

Take a bit of austerity years, a bit of demonic posh girl, a bit of older man's sadness and mix together with a summer holiday at home and you get 'Harriet Said'.

As the Neilson stuff above says it is evocative of A childhood, not childhood in general. The 'rundown seaside resort' hardly features.

It's actually a book about hero worshipping your best friend, the cruelty of teenage girls and the loneliness of middle-aged men.

The relationship between the narrator and Harriet calls to mind the relationship between the two girls in 'Heavenly Creatures', with similar results.

The book catches so well that teenage feeling of loving your friends so dearly that you will be led by them to do anything, while at the same time dreading seeing them and fearing what they'll do or say next.

The descriptions of post-war Britain in a summer time where sexual awakening meets teenage over-reaching fills the landscape with bloated dead things, rotting dogs on the beach, copses sinister with life, everything alive and over detailed, literally pulsing with unpleasant possibility.

I really enjoyed it.

Cheers,

Billy

I agree with David.

It's okay, but nothing special. Harris doesn't really manage to bring anything alive about the period the book covers and the book often reads like a magazine article writ large.

I dunno, maybe I have to high expectations for rock and pop books. Raised on a diet of Jon Savage, Simon Reynolds, Greil Marcus and even Julie Burchill and Charles Sharr Murray, if it says pop and politics on the cover, I really DO want the politics bit.

Also, for something so near in recent memory, there is often a feeling of remove, with Harris relying on chart placings and NME clippings, as if Brit Pop happened a hundred years ago not ten.

I also second David about Magpie Eyes: The Creation Records Story, now there's a real book about pop and politics.

Cheers,

Billy