View Full Version : New fiction...
Lurking for a few weeks now, I notice how little new fiction is mentioned here...
Er. Discuss.
Depends on what you mean by 'new fiction' I suppose. I think we focus as much on recently released stuff as anything else... though I suppose I might be wrong - what do others think?
Mind you, as a kind of recommendation, for 'new' writing, I found The Rotters Club by Jonathon Coe one of the best books I have read for a long while. Very amusing, and sincere, and most enjoyable. Of the rest of his books, What a Carve Up! and The House of Sleep are also excellent.
I guess we're just finding our feet (we're still in that college freshers frame of mind; "what A-levels did you do and where do you come from?"). Plus there's only forty members.
But, you're right. We haven't discussed too much new fiction here.
I suppose the most recent recent thing I read was the Iain Banks shock-jock thing, Dead Air.
Before that it would've been Happy Like Murderers and a re-reading of As If. Not very cheery, I'm afraid.
Dead Air got a bit of a pasting when it came out, but I couldn't help but enjoy it. Much of my twenties was played out to a narrative track by Banks and I feel a certain loyalty to him, plus he does write with a lot of verve and sparkle. There was no plot (and I mean no plot) to speak of, but plenty of ideas, and a lot of verbal acrobatics. I think he's a great talent. He doesn't know how to end his books though.
Happy Like Murderers; well, it'd take a very strong will to ever consider reading that again, even though Burn is one of my favourite writers. It's a desperately bleak world view and certainly a book to put down and walk away from occasionally. They say - although I've never read any - that David Peace's Red Riding series are executed in a similar verité style, so I'd be interested to hear if anyone has experienced his stuff. As If is just amazing and should be on every school syllabus in the country.
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Oh, yeah, The Rotters' Club. Brilliant, brilliant book. When's the sequel/continuation out?
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Happy Like Murderers is an awsome book. Terribly bleak, it's refusal to cast judgement on the wickedness of the West's might infuriate a reader not knowing what to expect of Burn.
Didn't he give Peter Sutcliffe a similar treatment?
David Peace certainly has a great deal of respect for Burn, not sure if there is anything more to it than that. In Peace's Top Ten of True Crime books, for the Guardian Here (http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s/top10/0,6109,871513,00.html), he notes that Burn is the best British writer there is. High praise indeed.
of Peace's Red Riding quartet, I am on the second, 1977 at the moment. They are bleak, violent affairs, that smack more of James Ellroy than Burn, to be honest. Corruption, prejudice, and visceral violence are everywhere. It's unpleasant, but compelling.
Peace is currently working on a series of books about the Miner's strikes of the eighties. A short chapter of this was included as his entry in the Granta best young novellists book, and looked very promising.
The Ripper book is Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son and although way way classier than the usual 'True Crime' tat, is nowhere near the stylistic triumph that HLM manages to be. Still jolly good though, up there with Killing for Company and In Cold Blood.
I suppose I ought to get round to reading Peace, eventually.
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In Cold Blood... the Truman Capote book? Amazing.
Fictionalised true crime seems to have become a sub-genre of its own recently. Jake Arnott's excellent The Long Firm... and his not quite so good He Kills Coppers.
Yep, Capote. Great book.
Went past Holcomb, Kansas when I drove across the states a couple of years ago. 'Middle of nowhere' just doesn't do it justice.
I've not read any Arnott, though I pick up The Long Firm virtually every time I go in Waterstones.
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I read Midnight In The Garden of Good And Evil a few years ago - a sort of modern version of the In Cold Blood theme. Well-written, but it was as if Truman Capote had already used up all the oxygen in that genre and nothing else was going to match up.
Lucoid
2nd Jun 2003, 13:31
I didn't know Truman Capote wrote that kind of stuff, though I suppose the style of Breakfast at Tiffany's (the book itself as opposed to the film adptation) does reflect it.
It's a one-off, I think
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skanky
2nd Jun 2003, 17:11
He doesn't know how to end his books though.
That's one of the things I think he's good at. Though I haven't read (m)any of his most recent books.
"I didn't know Truman Capote wrote that kind of stuff..."
Though he grew up as a childhood friend of Harper Lee, he ended up as a fantastic journalist on the New Yorker... and I'd guess laid the groundwork for Norman Mailer's work mixing fiction style with non-fiction reportage.
"I didn't know Truman Capote wrote that kind of stuff..."
Though he grew up as a childhood friend of Harper Lee, he ended up as a fantastic journalist on the New Yorker... and I'd guess laid the groundwork for Norman Mailer's work mixing fiction style with non-fiction reportage.
The idea of the rather effete Capote slumming it with the god-fearing folk of rural Kansas has always amused me. But it is, as you say, a terrific book...I remember the second or third time I read it, I stayed up all night: literally could not put it down.
It's a pity, in a way, he didn't do more in this vein. I think he would have been as good a New Journalist as Mailer, and probably rather better than the overrated one-trick pony Tom Wolfe.
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