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POETRY COLLECTION DALJIT NAGRA Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! (Faber) ●●●●●
Daljit Nagra’s second collection, with its lavish title, abundant exclamation marks and CAPS, marks another fine display of showmanship. Nagra swaggers through the ‘gyres and galaxies’ of the English tradition doing things his way: Shakespearian sonnets jostle with monsoon songs; Kipling’s legendary Lispeth has her say, and ‘Raju t’Wonder Dog’ (‘ . . . secretly/ t’incarnation of some ‘indu God’) comes from ‘uddersfield’. Nagra uses Punjabi-meets-English ‘Punglish’ (‘vy
all ju eat so much Oxo-/ Paxo, tanning for Bingo,
Disco?’; wordplay that crackles with static: ‘he cheeky/ chit-me-chat’; while contemplative poems such as ‘Ken’ (‘’My kin believe the old/ must spin out bygone yarns/ to keep in the light’) make the louder poems the more joyfully frenetic. With balls, bollyverse and bhajis, energetic irreverence and satire, Nagra’s second outing is something very exciting indeed. (Peggy Hughes)
BLACK COMEDY CHUCK PALAHNIUK Damned (Jonathan Cape) ●●●●● Like the preceding 11, Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel is a black comedy that satirises a taboo subject, features a protagonist with a malleable identity who is indoctrinated into a bizarre cult and is structured around repetition, most notably, some chanted catchphrases. With Damned, Palahniuk targets religion through the story of Madison, the 13-year-old overweight daughter of movie-star parents who dies of a drug overdose and finds herself in Hell, which turns out to be half Bruegel,
half contemporary claptrap (call centres, crap movies).
Books REVIEWS
CRIME THRILLER NEIL CROSS The Calling (Simon & Schuster) ●●●●● Luther was a BBC crime drama fronted by Idris Elba (The Wire) that aired last year and earlier this summer. It followed Elba’s tortured police detective through a series of investigations that foregrounded a battles of wits with the perpetrators, and succeeded as a portrayal of the ethics involved in modern policing. Neil Cross – who wrote all the episodes for TV – has now penned this prequel which charts Luther’s journey through a particularly nasty murder case, the repercussions of which chase him throughout the subsequent TV series. The Calling is very much a tie-in. It reads like a screenplay: jumping from scene to scene without delving into the inner lives of the characters in any depth. The story is deftly concocted – more gruesome than its BBC counterpart and suitably compelling – but isn’t strong enough as a standalone work. Without Elba’s weighty presence (and leavening humour) this incarnation of Luther fails to come to life. (Suzanne Black)
WAR COMIC JAY CANTOR & JAMES ROMBERGER Aaron and Ahmed: A Love Story (Vertigo/Titan) ●●●●●
Novelist, scriptwriter and essayist Jay Cantor’s foray into comics starts as a simple examination of the relationship between an army doctor/torturer and a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, then heads off on a wild tangent concerning the linguistic programming of suicide bombers. The first third is nicely paced as doctor Aaron attempts a new form of kind coercion to prise information about Al Qaeda’s ‘terror plans’ from Ahmed. It starts to lose focus with the introduction of the
There, Madison meets up with four more dead troubled teens (a nod to brat- pack hit The Breakfast Club) and the quintet duck eternal detention and go looking for Satan. As usual, the hip, flip prose skips along invoking and ridiculing pop culture. Palahniuk’s got a good formula and he’s sticking to it. To his seasoned reader it may feel stale, to the newcomer fresh and funny. So, in a sense, he’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. (Miles Fielder)
concept of ‘memes’, in this case audio cues and chants used to encode the ‘meat computer’ for martyrdom. Ending in New York with Aaron trapped in a battle with his own psyche as he fights against ‘an enemy inside me, a virus that would program my brain’, Romberger’s scratchy art brings a chaotic human quality to the story, but Cantor’s script is a sometimes confused take on a fascinating theme. (Henry Northmore)
ALSO PUBLISHED POLITICS AND SOCIETY
After helping to bring an end to the culture of gross expenses claims in the corridors of parliament, Heather Brooke (a US investigative journalist born to Scouse parents) turns her attention to ‘the world of computer hackers, internet whistleblowers and pro-democracy campaigners’. The Revolution Will Be Digitised (Heinemann) includes an in- depth analysis on WikiLeaks, concluding that governments no longer have a stranglehold on the flow of information that they once could rely upon, thanks to Julian Assange and his ilk. But is this shift an unconditionally good thing? In further web-based concerns, Douglas Edwards brings us
I’m Feeling Lucky (Allen Lane). Subtitled ‘The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59’, it takes us deep inside the Googleplex to track the story of how it got where it is today, a rip-roaring read of the ‘unique, self-invented culture of the world’s most transformative corporation’.
Now in his third year as a junior doctor, Max Pemberton returns to the hospital where he began his medical career, now finding himself working marathon shifts in A&E and dementia wards, fuelled mainly by caffeine, nicotine and lots and lots of cake. The Doctor Will See You Now (Hodder) is the funny/scary result.
Clearly less funny and much more scary is The 11th Day by
Anthony Summers (Doubleday) which is billed as the ‘ultimate’ account of the events of 11 September, 2001. There will be a raft of books to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the US, but this one took the investigative author of books on the JFK assassination and the secret life of Edgar J Hoover four years to write, and features thousands of documents and hundreds of hours of interviews and testimonies. (Brian Donaldson)
18–25 Aug 2011 THE LIST 95