A curmudgeon writes.
Preacher, Volume 2: Until the End of the World by Garth Ennis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Until the End of the World, the second trade paperback in the Preacher series, gathers together issues 8-17 of the comic about the Texas padre with the Word of God in his skull, a failed-assassin girlfriend and an Irish vampire best mate. It’s also the trade wherein shit gets weird.
Well, weirder. Continue reading “Book review: Preacher, Volume 2: Until the End of the World”
The Suburbs Of Hell by Randolph Stow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A title taken from Webster’s The White Devil? Oh, Randolph Stow, you shouldn’t have. It’s as if you want me to think this is a gory little chapbook of a thing.
Well, it is, really. This is a novel about murder. But it’s not the usual type: there’s no neat little bow to wrap around everything. Here, it’s a bit different. It’s a meditation on the endpoint of murder – death – and a refraction of four years of Western Australia killings, written from half a world away. Continue reading “Book review: The Suburbs Of Hell”
My Life As A Fake by Peter Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Take a 1940s literary hoax, Frankenstein, Rilke, Ezra Pound, literary journal editorship and the memsahib culture of Malaysia in the middle of last century and whip it all up with ulcerated legs and modish, society-shocking femmes fatales and you’ve pretty much got this entry in Carey’s oeuvre. My Life as a Fake is shorter than a lot of his other work – I think it’s probably on par with something like The Tax Inspector for length – but it packs a pretty hefty punch. Continue reading “Book review: My Life As A Fake”
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hiromi Kawakami has, in Strange Weather in Tokyo, written a fairly plot-free novel that charts the deepening friendship between Tsukiko, a late-30s woman, and Sensei, her teacher from years ago. They meet in a local bar – food and drink is key to the novel, bonding agents made of sake and mushrooms – and what follows is the story of pendulums going in and out of sync. Continue reading “Book review: Strange Weather in Tokyo”
Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you picked up Michael Peppiatt’s book looking for a biography of Bacon, you’re going to be disappointed. Yes, there are plenty of facts here. But no, Bacon-biog isn’t the point. This is a book about Peppiatt, himself. Actually, it’s more of a Venn diagram about how the writer’s life intersects with Bacon, though I must admit I am picturing such a diagram being loosely sketched on canvas by Francis himself, using the bin lid he kept for such circumference-related purposes.
To be fair, this book isn’t sold as an artist biography. Peppiatt has already written one of those, Continue reading “Book review: Francis Bacon in Your Blood”
Drive by James Sallis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
He just drives. The guy. Here. Driver. Just drives. We know this because it’s his name – he has no other. Having one name is badass, having no name (and a gritty backstory) is superbadass and generally an indicator that you’re at the intersection of pulp and noir.
James Sallis’s slight novel is wonderful. It’s economical, but sprinkled with ten-buck words. It’s a world away from the sci-fi that began his career, and though it’s a modern work, seems to be written under the influence of the best sort of taut technique: Thompson and Cain, say. Interlocking jobs (criminal or otherwise) and lives, none of them pristine, tell a largely criminal narrative, though without any sort of opprobrium. If anything, the action taking place in the Hollywood sun say just that This Is How It Is, and nothing more. It’s nihilism with better catering. Continue reading “Book review: Drive”
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’d known about Brighton Rock for ages – a combination of general awareness of Graham Greene and the Morrissey song ‘Now My Heart Is Full’ but I’d never read it. Now that I have, I can see why someone like the Smiths frontman would namecheck it: it’s a sordid, grimy window on the thirties, a look at the world of tough men and the children who wish to become them. Rough trade under the garish lights of a seaside town, immortalised in fiction and iconic film.
This is the second Greene I’d read (The Third Man being the much shorter first) and it pulled me in from the outset. I’m intrigued about the rest of his work, now. The story’s pretty simple: a murder is committed by Pinkie, a sociopathic pup with distinct lady problems. Ida, a voluminous seeker of good times, takes umbrage at the foul play she suspects has befallen a brief acquaintence, and decides to root out the truth. What follows is a sea mist-shrouded examination of the mental life of both the pursuer and the pursued, framed by the prospect of turf takeover from larger interests. Continue reading “Book review: Brighton Rock”
The Magic Cottage by James Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I recently spent some time in hospital, and thought this work might make a good companion. From the blurb, it suggested a zippy, not thoroughly taxing read. Fair enough, I thought: I’ll zip through it while waiting for day surgery and that will be that. Popcorn consumed.
So somehow, it’s ten days later and I’ve only just finished it. And why? Because I kept feeling like I had to flog myself onwards toward a finish line that wasn’t really worth it when I got over it.
List of the Lost by Morrissey
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Oh, Manchester. So much to answer for.
Look, I’m not going to lie. I’m a Morrissey fan. A big Morrissey fan. I wasn’t for a long time, but then something suddenly made sense, and I was all in on the guy. Smiths, solo, everything. I thought his Autobiography was compelling, and in places a lot more sweetly honest than any observer of the artist’s turn of phrase could have expected.
And now, this. It’s a novella, once again on Penguin, ostensibly about a team of runners in 1970s Boston. Who accidentally kill a vagrant-appearing demon and then are cursed.
Wait, what? Continue reading “Book review: List of the Lost”
Girl in a Band: A Memoir by Kim Gordon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The title of Kim Gordon’s autobiography is a neat reduction of how she’s been interpreted by media outlets and observers for years: the girl in the most apparently sausagefesty of bands, the fringe-and-pedals, truculent beast that was Sonic Youth. It is, naturally, reductive, a fiction pushed by those who’d copy to file, or those whose musical penates was the Kim and Thurston power couple.
The quote on the back of the book – pulled from its instant-in first chapter – best describes the artist’s feelings of being observed, categorised.
Onstage, people have told me, I’m opaque or mysterious or enigmatic or even cold. But more than any of those things, I’m extremely shy and sensitive, as if I can feel all the emotions swirling around a room. And believe me when I say that once you push past my persona, there aren’t any defenses there at all.
Of course, I’m guilty of this reduction. I like to defend this with the acknowledgement that Sonic Youth are a band I seem to ‘get’ more now that I’m older: I had some albums when I was growing up, but I always seemed to miss something, that there was a big secret that I couldn’t understand, an enjoyment others had that I couldn’t grasp. I couldn’t get a read on Gordon: she seemed like she took no shit, from my limited pre-internet knowledge, and that probably frightened me, as teenage-terrible as I was parsing women. Continue reading “Book review: Girl in a Band: A Memoir”
Yeah nah. 