‘My own predicament – a mathematician and homosexual who has done serviceable work in logic and computational theory but who has run foul of an illogical system of justice – seems very unremarkable.’
Readers in search of anything as straightforward as the above had better avoid Will Eaves’s fourth novel, Murmur, for it has achieved the holy grail of modern prose: conveying consciousness. And being in the stream of another’s mind would not be a coherent experience. ‘What is it... [read more]
It’s often said that we don’t read anymore, but look around any coffee shop, park or commuter train and people are constantly scanning and reading various feeds on their phones. Even people reading a physical book will often have a phone perched in front of it – hidden in the gutter margin like a dirty magazine – reading from both as if they are conjuring a real-time cut-up or montage between screen and page. It seems there’s a distinction between reading a novel and something such as... [read more]
Asymmetry, the title of Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, could refer to its unconventional structure, where two seemingly unrelated stories are joined together by a coda at the end, or the disparate lives of the characters of Alice and Amar, who respectively star in each section. It could describe other themes of the book: an age-gap relationship, the right of different nationals to travel undisturbed. It is an excellent title for an excellent book that examines the lives of characters trying to... [read more]
Giorgio Agamben, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, The Adventure
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, best known still for his 1995 study of biopolitics, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, has concentrated in recent years on increasingly slender essays on some of philosophy's biggest questions. In lesser hands, these could easily turn into the short introductions and bluffer's guides in which trade publishing has established a lucrative sideline. Nothing could be further from Agamben's intention. His technique is to begin with an arcane scholarly... [read more]
About halfway through Megan Dunn’s memoir, Tinderbox, there is a scene in which she recalls her interview for a master’s in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Her questioner, the acclaimed novelist and poet Michèle Roberts, offers aspiring author Dunn a sage piece of writing advice: ‘Play with your shit’. This she does, metaphorically speaking, throughout 150 pages of this wonderful, restless, formally daring first book.
Tinderbox is such a shape-shifter, such a sui... [read more]
The poetry in Jenna Clake’s debut volume, Fortune Cookie, is a poetry of combinations. It’s part exuberant, Whitmanesque catalogues, part absurdist, Beckettian permutations. Given Clake’s interest in the Feminine and Feminist Absurd in 21st-century British and American poetry, though, it’s quite likely that my advancing Whitman and Beckett as influences right at the outset is problematic. So I shouldn’t say influences, perhaps; I should say, instead, ‘Things I thought of while I... [read more]
There is a fashion in contemporary fiction to scorn the idea of the disembodied third person narrator. Who is it who knows all this, one can’t help but ask. And why are they hiding in the shadows, writing this book? Samuel Fisher turns this issue on its head in his debut novel by having his narrator be the book itself, writing itself. Not just any book, but any book: ‘every word that is written . . . every great work and every pulp entertainment, every suicide note and every shopping... [read more]
The press release for this complicated and blackly comic book pitches it somewhere between Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and JM Coetzee’s 1974 debut Dusklands. Though less accessible than James’s Booker winner, Three Pioneers follows in its ambitious footsteps by updating postmodernist methods and ideas most current writers lack the patience, skill or inclination to go near. Through three bizarre, unconnected narratives – from a researcher of black sites in... [read more]
Horatio Morpurgo, The Paradoxal Compass: Drake’s Dilemma
reviewed by PK Read
Whether going east or west, a northern maritime route skirting the Arctic was long a European fever dream. Northern passages have recently become more realistic due to declining levels of sea ice, and nations are bringing to bear their territorial claims along with the latest exploratory technologies for mineral and resource exploitation. Drilling and shipping are already on the rise, even before biologists have had an opportunity to learn more about the undiscovered life present in newly... [read more]
Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds.), 'Tomorrow Belongs to Us': The British Far Right since 1967
reviewed by David Renton
The editors of this book are also authors of previous accounts of British fascism. Nigel Copsey's Anti-Fascism in Britain (1999) told the story of the conflict between fascism and anti-fascism since the 1920s; Matthew Worley's No Future (2017) explored how the left and the right related to post-punk after 1979, lengthening the story of the relationship between politics and music beyond the demise of Rock Against Racism in 1981. This volume is intended to showcase the work of a generation of... [read more]
