COMIC THRILLER ED PARK Personal Days (Jonathan Cape) OOO
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Set in an unnamed New York company. Ed Park's quirky debut begins like a Dilbert cartoon or a particularly deadpan episode of The Office. A group of interchangeably fireable wage slaves. their jobs ill-defined even to them, develop close but fickle bonds through email, unrequited crushes and second guessing which management intrigues are plotting their personal doom. Related in a wry. emotionless prose by an unidentified narrator, Personal Days is amusineg spare. yet soon becomes something darker. aspiring perhaps to the unblinking horror of Joseph Heller's corporate schlub epic Something Happened. Ultimately. Park doesn't have the stomach for this though. retaining an ironic distance and skewing his novel into a daft. paranoid thriller when a rogue element joins the
company. For a subtler study of insidious corporate politics and psychosis. try Peter Cook and John Cleese's overlooked film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer instead.
(Jay Richardson)
FAMILY DRAMA RICHARD MASON
The Lighted Rooms (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) OD.
The Lighted Rooms takes on a vast array of human experience from Boer War concentration camps and townships of modern-day Bloemfontein to commodities trading crises and antiseptic nursing homes in Qtst century London. Before consigning her mother. Joan, to a nursing home in Wandsworth. hedge fund trader Eloise takes her to visit their family home. now a shopping mall. in Bloemfontein. Called back to London when an investment goes awry. Eloise leaves Joan to investigate her family's experience of the war. Joan discovers
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her grandmother's diary recording her time in a concentration camp which. when she returns to London. triggers the entanglement of hallucination that consumes her til death. The book is enjoyable. entertaining, and perfectly readable. but had Mason made more of his material, it could have produced an astounding narrative. Instead. he has written onethatthough engaging, never quite grasps the imagination or reaches the climax that it could. (Katie Gould)
FAMILY COMEDY WILLIAM SUTCLIFFE Whatever Makes You Happy (Bloomsbury) 000
William Sutcliffe. Edinburgh-based spouse to Maggie O'Farrell and schoolmate of Ali G. is still best known for his 1997 coming of age debut Are You Experienced? Eleven years and three more books later. his fifth novel. Whatever Makes You Happy, is still trying to come to terms with the process of growing up. It's only the youngsters that get old. as this tale of three shiftless thirtysomething men whose lives are invaded by their mothers for a week of live-in life coaching attests.
It's unashamedly
WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY
aimed straight at the heart of the Hornby/Parsons market, but that's only a negative if you don't share a similarly middle-class viewpoint to those involved. Sutcliffe‘s prose is crisp and made to be gulped down. a fluency with his characters is capable enough that more than one generation will find someone to relate to. and his situations are gently but truthfully amusing. The film deal is lined up already. the seat on Richard and Judy's sofa awaits. (David Pollock)
MUSIC BIOGRAPHY MARK E SMITH WITH AUSTIN COLLINGS
Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith
(Viking) one
The real joy of Mark E Smith and The Fall has always been expecting the unexpected. His music has always stuck to a rigid formula but is somehow never formulaic. and he's
SOCIAL DRAMA JOHN BURNSIDE Glister
(Jonathan Cape) 0000
survived every British musical subculture since punk with his dignity and C&A sweater intact. Renegade is a chronological dig through his 51 years via 32 albums. an
apprenticeship down
the docks. reading the football scores on
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languishing in American prisons. nuggets which reveal as much about the psyche of the British working classes as they do his own inner workings.
Brutal. funny. caustic and honest. he candidly acknowledges lean times — financially, spiritually and creatively — in between berating the dozens of former Fall members' egotism. childishness or general ineptitude. a conflict which he seems to thrive on. Smith rants and rambles like that Supposedly nutty geezer in the pub corner but actually makes a fair bit of sense in the cold light of day.
(Mark Robertson)
5 TRAVEL BOOKS Daniel Kalder Strange Telescopes Following up his Lost Cosmonaut, this intrepid Fifer goes on the hunt for some more offbeat individuals in the former Soviet Union. Faber.
Susanna Clark A House in Fez Subtitled ‘Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco'. the author tells of how she and her hubby restored a dilapidated riad and settled into their new surroundings. Ebury. Dan Kleran and Ian Vince Three Men in a Float At a steady pace of 15mph, these two cranky guys journey across England from east to west in a decommissioned milk float. John Murray.
Joe Bennett Where Underpants Come From This one is quite specifically subtitled 'From Checkout to Cotton Field: Travels Through the New China’. Simon & Schuster.
Time Out 7000 Things to Do in Britain Everything from castles to kayaking and pink knuckle rides to sandy white beaches are featured in this pretty packed guide. Time Out.
It’s safe to say this latest novel from Fifer John Burnside won’t be sparking a tourism boom on the east coast anytime soon. But his bleakly beautiful tale digs beneath the surface of the everyday to do what he does best, hunting out terrifying and comforting truths about what makes us tick. The fictional hell-hole of lnnertown lives in the shadow of a disused chemical plant. It’s not clear what poisons were brewed up behind the factory walls, but the coastline is suffering a toxic hangover, where deformed animals and diseased humans crawl about their day-to-day existences. When schoolboys start disappearing, the local bobby seems suspiciously blasé, and a collective, paranoid finger is pointed at a reclusive weirdo hiding in the wasteland, writing love letters to a death row killer.
Burnside narrates his way around the grim backdrop of smalltown claustrophia and inertia through Leonard, a 15-year-old bookworm. A likeable, sensitive smartarse that knows exactly what it means when a teacher calls him a misanthrope, and quotes Moliere right back at him, he’s full of the kind of precocious insight that makes him all the more aware of the nightmare life mapped out for him. Part coming-of-age drama, part sci- fi thriller, with a healthy dose of satisfyingly dark Scottish miserabilism, the themes of sin and redemption or death and the afterlife should make this as heavy as a wrecking ball, but Burnside’s too subtle and masterful with his language for that. In his hands, the doom and gloom becomes absorbing and eloquent. (Claire Sawers)
8—22 May 2008 THE LIST 39