list.co.uk/books Reviews | BOOKS
PHOTOGRAPHY SHEILA ROCK Punk + (First Third Books) ●●●●●
Sheila Rock’s superb photo-history of the short-lived but aftershock-long punk scene ends with a series of John Lydon shots. It’s 1980 and punk is indeed dead, the ex-Pistols sneermonger now fully ensconced in his new PiL project. Mooching around in a room full of records, books and punk memorabilia, we get
the familiar sideways grin and the iconic manic stare.
But the very last picture is something different altogether:
Lydon is caught in a more rel ective pose, a little boy lost, perhaps stunned at having come through the late-70s ruc- tions relatively unscathed and grateful that, unlike Sid, he still has a chance to put his own stamp on musical history. For Sheila Rock, the post-punk years meant a career- dei ning stint at The Face, but for four years, this American snapper took crate-loads of pictures which captured the essence of punk and evoked the moments in between the hysteria. Split into sections – Fashion, Crowd, Scene, Music, and + (about life after punk for some of the punks) – many of the photos are accompanied by chat from those heavily involved in shaping the genre’s style, music and legacy such as Jon Savage, Jeannette Lee, Don Letts and Chrissie Hynde, rel ecting on everyone from Siouxsie to Strummer and Weller to Westwood.
Removed from the history is the violent exhilaration of the gigs and there’s just one shoo-shooing mention of the movement’s occasional l irtation with Nazi imagery – but this warts-if-not-quite-all document is powerfully put together. (Brian Donaldson)
SCI-FI COMEDY MATT HAIG The Humans (Canongate) ●●●●●
GRAPHIC NOVEL AUDREY NIFFENEGGER Raven Girl (Abrams ComicArts) ●●●●● POLITICAL FICTION MANDY HAGGITH Bear Witness (Saraband) ●●●●●
POETRY ANDREW PHILIP The North End of the Possible (Salt) ●●●●●
As Matt Haig acknowledges at the end of this very funny i fth novel, both The Humans and his writing career originated in a breakdown that became a breakthrough. Recovering from severe panic attacks by reading and crafting narratives, storytelling helped Haig to reconsider what it meant to be a mortal, earthborn bioped.
With shades of The Man Who Fell
to Earth, the book's narrator is an alien being who steals the body of Cambridge Professor Andrew Martin, a mathematician who has just made a critical discovery in the understanding of prime numbers. Lest unstable, aggressive humanity acts upon Martin's discovery to advance their civilisation, the imposter is charged with eradicating all proof, along with the professor's wife and teenage son. Struggling to comprehend such exotic concepts as clothes, death, love and peanut butter sandwiches, the alien's outsider perspective is perpetually perplexed but astute, drolly hilarious and full of poignant and painful insight into what it is to be human. (Jay Richardson)
Despite the dark themes in her bestseller The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger may not be readily associated with creepy fairytales and body horror. However, the off-kilter beauty of her illustrated work, The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, can be more explicitly categorised along these lines, featuring a cat being pulled from a woman’s womb and l oating foetuses. While the squeamish might shy away
from this, Niffenegger’s stories have such charm and sweet melancholy, and her illustrations are so wonderful, that you are drawn into her mysterious world. Raven Girl tells the story of a postman and a raven who fall in love and have a child who is born human but has a raven’s voice. She longs to be fully raven, and it’s here that this fable takes a modern twist through means more medical than magical.
Although Niffenegger’s prose is not her strong point, with often jarring and clunky sentences, she weaves a good narrative and her aquatint illustrations are stunning, making this book-as- object an item to covet. (Ever Dundas)
In this all-too-human portrayal of the i ght for the wild, we follow Callis MacArthur, a bear-loving ecologist, through the aftermath of the shooting of the last wild Norwegian cub. Angered by this violence, Callis endangers both her career and her relationships to join the campaign for the reintroduction of bears, not only to Norway, but Scotland too.
This is a novel of many elements: part myth, part romance, part feminist, part activist, part environmental politics – all of which vie for the reader's attention. The separate elements would make for an interesting read, but the combination is a little cumbersome.
The book would benei t from
more about the animals themselves. Mandy Haggith writes beautifully about them, and the landscape in which they thrive, and it's in these scenes where you i nd the heart of the novel. Unfortunately the bears are few and far between, and the novel lacks the depth to convince the reader without them. (Kylie Grant)
Salt cements its reputation for fresh contemporary poetry with this much- anticipated second full collection from acclaimed Scottish poet Andrew Philip.
The book starts and ends with further exploits of MacAdam: not the Ayr-born inventor of modern road surfacing, rather the inscrutable, ludic character who haunted Philip’s i rst collection The Ambulance Box. Our enigmatic hero recycles moons and constructs a garden shed accelerator to discover ‘the fundamental particle of night’. Later, ‘clean out of Red Bull’, he’s wading into nocturnal surf, questioning hope in a Kafkaesque jail, and enduring an interrogation of surreal non-sequiturs.
The central section highlights Philip’s considerable formal talents with poems of love, place and politics, especially in his delicate exploration of a decade- long marriage, ‘10x10’. Truly European – referencing Gaelic, German and Swedish – Philip also ranks among the best current Scots poets: his brilliantly funny, Burns-pastiche excoriation of bad Edinburgh buskers is worth the cover price alone. (Colin Begg)
18 Apr–16 May 2013 THE LIST 45