Read and Appreciated in 2003
A Year’s Best List
1. Story collection (i): Open the Box, Andrew Humphrey
(Elastic Press, 2003)
The Norwich of Andrew Humphrey’s imagination is as richly imagined and as universal as James Kelman’s Glasgow: he is East Anglia’s laureate of loss and alienation. Humphrey has been described as a ‘rising star’ of the UK independent press, but on the evidence of the softly spoken and tormented tales collected in the Open the Box he deserves the widest possible audience. His deft, poignant and laconic stories—switching from fantasy to gritty realism and back—pick their way through the psychological wreckage of twenty-first century lives out of kilter. For me, the cumulative effect of these 13 tense and entertaining tales is an overwhelming sense of anger at the damage inflicted on the western psyche by the horrors of neo-utilitarianism.
2. Story collection (ii): The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, Michael Moorcock
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)
It’s 30 years to the month since I first started reading these densely symbolic and fragmented chronicles, but Moorcock’s witty, surreal and disturbing JC short stories are every bit as relevant as they were in the early 1970s. Several of the original 1960s/70s tales have been replaced by more recent stories (‘The Spencer Inheritance’, ‘Cheering for the Rockets’, ‘The Camus Referendum’, ‘Firing the Cathedral’) to worthwhile effect. The new stories are amongst the strongest and it’s interesting to reflect on the ways in which JC has mutated in response to our own lives and times. The thematic flexibility of the Cornelius stories allows Moorock to tackle the uses and abuses of science, the resurgence of magical thinking, celebrity, the influence of the mass media and—of course—neo-colonialism. Recommended reading for Prime Ministers, Presidents and Media Moguls everywhere.
3. Novel (i): China, Alan Wall
(Secker and Warburg, 2003)
Politically engaged, beautifully written, touching and funny, China is a triumphantly redemptive tragicomedy of corporate power and its victims. This tangled tale of art, history, globalisation, terrorism, money, love, loss and the new anarchism entirely justifies Alan Wall’s growing reputation as one of the UK’s most erudite, perceptive and emotionally resonant writers.
4. Novel (ii): Rule of Night, Trevor Hoyle
(Pomona, 2003)
Originally published in 1975, this is the story of Kenny Seddon, an alienated, violent teenage skinhead. Written 30 years before the current boom in urban hard man literature, Rule of Night is a cool, restrained slice of gritty realism. Hoyle rejects easy moral platitudes and the allure of ‘stylish’ violence to take his readers into Kenny’s world and his psyche. He’s a hard character to like but, against the odds, we do care what happens to him at the end of the book. Which is just as well because there’s a note in the copyright statement that tells us that Kenny knows where we live…
5. Novel (iii): The End of My Tether, Neil Astley
(Scribner, 2003)
The End of My Tether is a convoluted and densely plotted tale pitting the mystic (not to mention quasi-mythical) Inspector Kernan against the forces of agribusiness and untrammeled capitalism. It’s a challenging read: the plot is crammed to bursting with mythic and literary archetypes and peppered with folk tales, songs, woodcuts and almanac-style snippets of folklore. Furthermore, The timeframe shifts constantly and characters metamorphose and, in some cases, undergo a form of dissolution familiar to admirers of Thomas Pynchon. Astley’s anger at corrupt politicians, business people and public servants—particularly in relation to the causes and handling of the UK outbreak of BSE in cattle—is palpable on every page. Some critics found the authorial voice petulant; others felt the story was smothered by ‘wordy indulgences’ (Nicola McAllister in The Guardian). But for me it’s a dazzling fantasy-thriller and I thoroughly enjoyed the way Astley puts the boot into his privileged conspirators, aspirant wheeler dealers and dodgy cops.
6. Play: Toby Swift’s 2003 radio production of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance by John Arden, (First performed in 1959; new production for BBC Radio 3 broadcast December 2003)
Another timely return to a long admired piece of work. This was a compelling new production (with stunning sound design) of Arden’s examination in prose, ballad and verse of the psychologically consuming nature of retributive violence. The action takes place in a North of England mining town in the late nineteenth century town, where a group of army deserters are planning to exact revenge for the death of a fellow soldier. As one of the characters observes at the end of the play, ‘You can’t cure the pox by further whoring’.
7. Album: The Wind, Warren Zevon
(Artemis, 2003)
An elegiac, bleakly humorous, sad and inspiring departure by the maestro of ‘rock noir’ who died in September. For those of us who’ve laughed, shuddered and raged with Zevon over the years it’s hard to hear the lyrics of the final track ‘Keep Me in Your Heart,’ without a lump in the throat. “There’s a train leaving nightly called ‘when all is said and done’, keep me in your heart for a while…”
8. Film (DVD re-release): The Wicker Man: The Director’s Cut, Directed by Robin Hardy, screenplay by Anthony Shaffer
(Studio Canal, 2002)
This year I finally caught up with the restored version of Hardy and Shaffer’s strange and brilliant film about a deeply unsettling collision of Christianity with paganism. It’s a flawed masterpiece. Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward give their finest performances and I can’t argue with the critics who have described it as the best British horror movie. The accompanying documentary, in which it is asserted that the original print was dumped in a hole that now lies below a motorway, is every bit as disturbing as the movie itself.
9. Non fiction book: The Age of Consent, George Monbiot
(Flamingo, 2003)
Quite simply the finest essays on how we live and how we could live for a very long time. Monbiot outlines globalisation and its discontents and mounts a passionate defence of democracy.
10. Exhibition: End of residency show, Chad McCail
(Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead UK, April 2003)
A comic strip narrative of zombies, robots and parasites presented at the Baltic gallery and on hoardings around Newcastle and Gateshead. Sex, repression and power. Have a gander:
Andrew Hedgecock is a freelance writer and researcher based in Nottinghamshire, England. His interviews, reviews and essays have appeared in The Third Alternative, The Spectator, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Time Out City Guides, The Edge, The Zone, the French magazine Yellow Submarine and the Fantastic Metropolis sampler, Breaking Windows. His work can also be found online at The Alien Online, The Zone and here at Fantastic Metropolis. Andrew lives and works on the edge of what’s left of Sherwood Forest, halfway between two imposing synthetic hills–one an iron age barrow, the other a re-landscaped colliery tip.
Copyright © 2003 by Andrew Hedgecock.
