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vanquished and just one family on the run from it all. We can see what Rhys Thomas is trying to do with his second novel and, for the most part, On the Third Day is very good in a typical thriller kind of way. Where it falls down, however, is when he attempts to make it more than that; the story is soon riddled with symbolism about the state of the modern world and the collapse of community, with existential crises aplenty as events expose the best and worst of humanity.
These are huge issues to address and are perhaps a little out of Thomas’ reach as a writer as he successfully terrifies with twists and brutal gore but clumsily crams philosophical scraps into the plot rather than thoughtfully unpicking the questions and complex emotions they provoke. A subtler approach would perhaps have been more effective. (Camilla Pia)
HUMOUR ESSAYS SLOANE CROSLEY How Did You Get This Number (Portobello) ●●●●●
You have to hand it to someone who footnotes the parental dedication at the beginning of their book with a diatribe about the memory of some still-raw teenage punishment. Then
again, you may also feel compelled towards suspicion when you discover that the author is a photogenic New York literary publicist, whom style mags are proclaiming to be ‘the new Dorothy Parker’. She really isn’t.
She is, however, possessed of a certain wit and just enough of a jetsetting lifestyle and sense of self-absorption to make her an aspirational icon to Candace Bushnell’s audience. Here, she writes fluently of apartment-sharing in urbane New York, although trips to Lisbon and Paris (‘a place filled with the highest percentage of women on the planet able to pull off chinchilla wraps with jeans’) are redolent of the American abroad stereotype. The moral to these tales is simply that this is what Sloane thinks, and you might quite like her. (David Pollock)
COMIC/FILM PETER MILLIGAN & DAVIDE GIANFELICE Greek Street: Blood Calls For Blood (Titan/Vertigo) ●●●●●
Peter Milligan is one of the comic world’s most interesting writers. From back on his days at 2000AD (where he gave us the wonderful ‘Bad Company’) through oddities such as Skin to his natural home at Vertigo, where his Shade the Changing Man (among many others) fitted in naturally alongside Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, he’s made a massive impact. It’s when he’s given the free rein on an imprint like Vertigo that Milligan really comes into his own and this new project is a perfect example of his unique
ALSO PUBLISHED Rob Jovanovic The Velvet Underground Unpeeled Some bands just refuse to go away and the Reed/Cale combo is one such example. This is the first full biog for two decades and is based on exclusive chats with the surviving members. Aurum. Rob Young Electric Eden Billed as an accessible survey of the ‘visionary, topographic and esoteric influences that have driven the margins of British folk music’, it features the diverse likes of Holst, Nick Drake and Aphex Twin. Faber. John Szwed The Man Who Recorded the World This is the story of Alan Lomax who spent years travelling the US with a tape recorder and capturing its heritage of music and song from the likes of Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton. Heinemann. John Powell How Music Works This book’s subtitle pretty much sums the whole thing up: ‘A Listener’s Guide to Harmony, Keys, Broken Chords, Perfect Pitch and the Secrets of a Good Tune’. Particular. Chris Campion Walking on the Moon ‘The Untold Story of the Police’ for those who still care about such matters. Aurum.
and leftfield take on storytelling. Retelling the Greek
Myths but repositioning them in modern London, starting with a warped take on Oedipus. You can tell the layers are building as he slowly peels back the skin to reveal more and more weirdness. These opening six issues are just setting the scene but this could be the start of something special. (Henry Northmore)
8–22 Jul 2010 THE LIST 37
AMERICAN SEQUEL BRET EASTON ELLIS Imperial Bedrooms (Picador) ●●●●●
Bret Easton Ellis blazed onto the American literary scene in 1985 with a novel so filled with hedonistic excess, you felt drunk just reading it. Populated by a cast of largely dislikeable teenagers, Less Than Zero took us to the heart of rich kid Los Angeles, where money, sex and Class A drugs were easier to come by than a fully functioning conscience. When you read it as a teenager, as most people do, Less Than Zero comes with a certain frisson of excitement. We know that protagonist Clay – with his dysfunctional family, promiscuity and label obsession – is little more than a troubled soul, but part of us wants to live like him, if only for a moment. Then you grow up. Or at least that’s the idea. Twenty-five years after Ellis first created Clay and his shallow pals, follow-up novel Imperial Bedrooms suggests that although we’ve moved on, he hasn’t. Now aged 43, Clay seems stuck in a state of arrested development, as keen on drink, drugs and casual sex as ever. Somehow in the intervening years, he has carved out a vaguely successful career as a writer, but rarely do we get a sense that he has the mental capacity to sign a birthday card, let alone create a screenplay. His conversations are banal, his vocabulary limited. After a brilliantly postmodern opening, Imperial Bedrooms peters out into a half- baked thriller and little more, leaving the reader as unfulfilled as Clay himself. (Kelly Apter)
SOCIAL MEMOIR ALEX MARSH Sex & Bowls & Rock & Roll (The Friday Project) ●●●●● Pooterish internet celebrity Alex Marsh (privatesecretdiary.com) features the adultescent concerns of that modern publishing anomaly, the hobbyist’s memoir (yeah, thanks Mr Hornby), in this book about rock’n’roll dreams being subsumed by sport. That his band majored in what can best be described as Essex pub rock and the sport was lawn bowls tells you everything you need to know about
That Sex & Bowls & Rock & Roll is an easy read may be because it is the edited highlights of Marsh’s alarmingly personal blog (he lives in rural Norfolk: who else is he going to moan to?). He has a few nice lines and a good take on human frailty, not least his own, but it’s difficult to care. (Paul Dale)
THRILLER DRAMA RHYS THOMAS On the Third Day (Doubleday) ●●●●● Rampaging humans infected with a mysterious, incurable disease, society’s structures crumbling, whole countries
Marsh’s book. His inoffensive, mildly amusing reminiscences are effectively montaged (or the literary equivalent) to climactic effect as hope and talent turn into smalltown eccentricity.