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The Explorer by James Smythe — Harper Voyager, 2013, £12.99, 265pp, ISBN 978-0-00-745675-8
The Explorer is the second of James Smythe’s novels to be released within a few months. This UK publication is datelined 2013 although it is copyrighted 2012, perhaps from an earlier US edition. Could this be a first novel, or … Continue reading
The Old Devil
My Christmas present to myself was a copy of John Fowles’s novel The Magus, which I re-read over the holiday period. The copy was a well-preserved UK first edition, which I bought not all that expensively from the Fowlesian specialist … Continue reading
Lionel says, “Merry Chrismass, Evrywun”
A bad book provides a variety of temptations, prime among them being just to ignore the thing and put it away in the Oxfam box. Bad books are usually written by incompetents, so are bad in uninteresting ways, but occasionally … Continue reading
Holy Cows
I first read The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth in 1962. I was 19. I had been influenced by Kingsley Amis’s description of it in New Maps of Hell (‘many claims to being the best science-fiction … Continue reading
In the Future Past
Nevil Shute wrote several novels with speculative content, of which the most celebrated is probably On the Beach (1957). Although his style was conventional and he is often thought of as a middlebrow author, Shute often had adventurous ideas and … Continue reading
Abattoirs, Rickshaws, Haunted Dreamers and The City
This is not a review of a novel so much as a recommendation of one – the best new novel I have read this year is Sam Thompson’s Communion Town. It is a first novel of impressive skill and imaginative … Continue reading
THE INNER MAN: The Life of J. G. Ballard – John Baxter (2011, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20.00; ISBN: 978 02978 6352 6)
Biographies of great writers, thrown together too soon after their deaths, tend towards the condition of a first draft of a life. The availability of living witnesses willing and eager to be interviewed, friends with scrapbooks and snapshots, even important … Continue reading
TALKING TO RUDOLF HESS – Desmond Zwar (2010, The History Press, £17.99; ISBN: 978-0-7524-5522-8)
The title is a misnomer: Zwar never actually talked to Rudolf Hess, the former Deputy Leader of the Nazis and Hitler’s chosen successor. His only contact was through intermediaries, whose verbal reports as written down by the author make up … Continue reading
MELANCHOLIA – directed by Lars von Trier (2011, 136 min., Cert: 15 – with Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Stellan Skarsgård, John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling)
This is a film famously upstaged by the stupid comments made by director Lars von Trier at a press conference during the Cannes Film Festival, which had been mounted to celebrate Kirsten Dunst’s award for Best Actress. (Von Trier himself … Continue reading
