The Seed Collectors
Walking Palm photo by JimfBleak
(by Scarlett Thomas). Copy the Gardener “Family Tree” at the opening of this novel and keep it close at hand. Perhaps you will be more successful than I at keeping the characters apart, remembering who is married to whom, who is whose brother and whether or not this sweaty encounter is adultery. The characters all seem to have the same name and hip “lifestyle”. The confusion is confounded by the chop-change style – in case the reader is not confused enough, incomplete passages of pop-psychology, dialogue and cogitation are interlarded without attribution. Is it Oleander, Clem, Charlie, Ollie, Bryony, Holly, Ash, Pi, Fleur, Skye or Pondscum this time? Bryony’s drunken shopping and eating…
Continue Reading →Headlong
Bruegel the Elder, Winter Landscape with skaters and bird trap
(by Michael Frayn) What would you do if you were certain that you had discovered a work of art not so much lost as mythical? A painting beyond value which is being used by rich rural idiots to block the fireplace. Horrible, unhinged, feckless Martin Clay makes that decision instantaneously in Michael Frayn’s Headlong. and then dithers about it until the reader wants to cry. This is a marvellous, unusual and comic book with some weaknesses – for one, the reader will learn more than s/he need ever know about Breugels both with and without “h”s, elder and younger and the bitter relationship between the Netherlands…
Continue Reading →On The Vigil
Image of President al-Assad by Ranan Lurie
There’s a candlelight vigil in the evening; All gather near the shelters, the rotunda, and they sing For swathes of the oppressed and lines of displaced refugees, But who will light a candle for the cause of this disease? My lion has a calm and pleasant manner when he roars. He’d never sanction poor behaviour, in or out of doors, He has a birthday coming up, so let us light for him A special taper carved out from a line of seraphim. Off you go and wring your hands and change the way you feel, I’ll strike a light for al-Assad and…
Continue Reading →The Holt Report
Open water
(by John Larkin and Geoffrey Barker) (1968) Yes, Americans can joke about President Taft being eaten by wolves (particularly greedy wolves) but only in Australia could a serving Prime Minister be taken by a shark. On Sunday 17 December 1967, Prime Minister Holt went for a swim near his beach house at Cheviot, near the Heads leading from Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, into the Bass Strait, and was never seen again. Though a shark is The Varnished Culture’s preferred theory (and after all this time, chances of finding traces are approximately nil) there are a number of other possible solutions; kelp…
Continue Reading →Theatre of Embarrassment
Brent went home for his guitar (Photo Radio Times)
A very anglo-saxon form of comedy, the Theatre of Embarrassment makes one squirm as well as laugh, and the laugh is often through gritted teeth. It is hard to watch and even harder to believe, yet it unfolds before your very eyes, arch and formal as Kabuki, visceral as a knife-fight in an alleyway. When Norman Gunston asks Warren Beatty if “it’s true Miss Carly Simon wrote that song about you…?…The Impossible Dream…?” or mentions en passant to an interrupting Linda McCartney “It’s funny, you know, you don’t look Japanese,” you are at The Theatre. When Larry and Cheryl David,…
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