Books Reviews www.list.co.uk/books
– there are no X Factor- esque divas at drama school or embarrassing attempts at teenage speak – this is tangled and intense, sinking into the teenage psyche in a striking depiction. This has to be a place in which you want to spend hours, though, because the book is an immersion in teenagers, their every thought, interplay and feeling. (Kate Gould) TEEN HORROR CHARLIE HIGSON The Enemy (Puffin) ●●●●●
Take a dose of 28 Days Later, touches of Survivors and Escape from New York and the author’s already-proven track record in writing adult genres for a young audience with the Young Bond series, and you have an impressive first instalment in ex-Fast Show scribe Charlie Higson’s new horror series for Puffin. With a mysterious disease either killing off adults or turning them into dangerous, feral murderers (ie zombies), the children of the world have absolute freedom to do what they want, as long as they can avoid the attentions of the fearsome ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’. Higson has fun with the concept, bringing the frank, youthful descriptiveness of Enid Blyton to a scenario which more resembles Lord of the Flies. Although a lot of the politicking is less interesting, the author’s descriptions of the city and its landmarks as one big playground, and the gruesome nature of the diseased elders, will thrill the collective imagination of his target audience. (David Pollock)
HISTORICAL FICTION VALERIE MARTIN The Confessions of Edward Day (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) ●●●●●
Valerie Martin has had great success as a purveyor of historical fiction, most notably with Mary Reilly, her retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde myth, and her Orange Prize- winning American slavery tale Property. This outing into the theatre world of 1970s New York in the form of a fictional memoir is less successful, however. Any such memoir stands or falls on the qualities of its ALSO PUBLISHED
5 UNIT SHIFTERS Dan Brown The Lost Symbol You may have heard of his last book, The Finchley Coat or something. Bob Langdon is back with more ‘history, codes and intrigue’. Some copies are expected to be sold. Bantam Press.
James Patterson Alex Cross’s Trial Abraham Cross helps a young lawyer tackle the re- emergence of the KKK in the deep south. Century.
Sebastian Faulks A Week in December A shift in pace for Faulks with a contemporary novel set in London over the course of a week in 2007 and featuring a shady hedge-fund manager, a Polish footballer and a female Tube driver. Hutchinson. Maeve Binchy The Return Journey A 21-strong collection of short stories from the well-loved Irish author, 14 of which are published in the UK for the first time ever. Orion.
Alexander McCall Smith The Lost Art of Gratitude The latest Isabel Dalhousie epic as out heroine is drawn into the ever murkier world of financial double-dealings. Little, Brown.
narrator, and there is something vacuous at the heart of Edward Day which leaves the reader none the wiser by the end. Giving us a
conventional love triangle between actors Edward, Madeleine and Guy – who saves Edward’s life early on – Martin plays the story for laughs and raises the odd chuckle, but the foppish and narcissistic world the trio live in strips the story of empathy. When the drama does come, it feels forced, making you wish Guy had left Edward to drown at the start, saving us all the bother. (Doug Johnstone)
TEENAGE DRAMA ELEANOR CATTON The Rehearsal (Granta) ●●●●●
Eleanor Catton’s debut novel is a labyrinthine tale of a high school sex scandal, exploring the ways in which it becomes part of the pupils’ lives and is purloined by students at the nearby drama school who use it for their end of term play. The premise – sex scandal in a high school – isn’t particularly original, but the way Catton manipulates the theme and weaves the parallel storylines together, provides it with a new narrative and slant. Written without the
clichés associated with depictions of teenagers
20 THE LIST 27 Aug–10 Sep 2009
CULTURAL HISTORY RICHARD WILLIAMS The Blue Moment (Faber) ●●●●●
It’s the only jazz album that legions of non-jazz fans possess. It helped define a cultural era and raked out a path for much of what followed. When Miles Davis marched his merry band into a converted Manhattan church in the spring of 1959, even the super-confident leader couldn’t have fully predicted that the relatively short recording session they were set to undertake would have such reverberations round the world. In Richard Williams’ easy-reading biography of a timeless classic, he notes that Kind of Blue emerged as almost an anti-jazz artefact, wilfully introspective and gloriously spacious when the genre to that point had been moulded by shiny happy people, albeit ones with a uniformly tough back-story. As well as annotating the sessions that produced the album and dissecting the five tracks within, he careers forward to analyse the long- term impact of the moment fashioned by Davis and his Italian-suited long- term collaborator Gil Evans, seeing echoes of the music and its spirit in the whole ethos of everything from ECM records to Velvet Underground and through to Talking Heads. Pink Floyd’s keyboardist Richard Wright said that the chord progressions on the album influenced the structure of ‘Breathe’ on The Dark Side of the Moon, while rapper Q-Tip stated that ‘it’s like the Bible; you will have one in your house.’ Quincy Jones plays it every day: ‘it’s my orange juice.’ However you sample the album, it’s a must-have in any collection, and this book makes a fine accompaniment to a rebirth of cool. (Brian Donaldson)
SCI-FI COMIC VARIOUS Nexion (kurtzibling@yahoo.co.uk) ●●●●● Another dispatch from the world of Scottish underground comics, this time all under the watchful eye of Curt Sibling as he gathers a selection of depraved and funny shorts for the first issue of his Nexion anthology. It has much in common with several other Scottish titles we’ve reviewed over the last few months sharing writers and artists (such
as Rob Miller and Dave Alexander) with various other publications (in fact ‘Omniscient Zorgo’ also appears in Wasted; ‘Star Trudge’ in Khaki Shorts and
Sibling’s characters Coyo and Zooma appear in his own Total Fear titles).
The quality is similarly high, particularly in terms of the art (Sibling’s strong style is instantly appealing) even if it is tempered with the odd duff story and a certain level of male wish fulfilment (large breasted scantily clad women are another Sibling calling card); Ian Laurie adds a much needed shot of darkness. (Henry Northmore)