Fantastic Metropolis

The outstanding new book of the year for 2004 (though officially published in February 2005) is David Britton’s Fuck Off And Die, a compendium of Horror Fun in the form of one of those juvenile annuals to which I used to contribute in the 1950s. Gorgeously produced, much of it in full colour, it comes with a fine introduction by Alan Moore and an illuminating essay (on ‘contra-fascism’, which is as good a term as any for Britton’s astonishing over-the-top method of dealing with the psychic underbelly of ‘compassionate conservatism’—a fine antidote to Bushovik sentimentality). Schopenhauer in action. Much of the La Squab material (Britton’s angelic Little Miss who rarely misses a literary assassination with her PPK 38) first appeared in that much missed magazine The Edge, edited by Graham Evans. You can get a taste of Savoy by going to their website—and indeed you can order this masterpiece of counter-culture comics from the same source. I could rave on forever. Moore and Britton between them remain the only truly seminal producers of comics left on the planet. I gather Alan likes it as much as I do. You’ll see the odd similarity of reference between Lord Horror’s Creep Boys (Meng and Ecker are back again) and the second series of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Everything else—I mean everything else—seems bland after a dose of this. Kris Guidio (with John Coulthart) on graphics, outstand Coulthart design, fine editing by Butterworth. The Withington Four at their outstanding best.

I’ve also enjoyed Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Maalouf’s Ports of Call, reread Woolf’s Between the Acts (still have problems with it, but not as many, and Woolf still beats almost every other 20^th century writer), People Like Us by Michael Collins, Letters to Auntie Fori by Martin Gilbert (both of which I reviewed for The London Magazine, also recommended), Steve Aylett’s Lint, also Aylett’s anthology of quotations from his own work, Tao te Jinx, and would direct you to The Guardian for other reviews of books I’ve enjoyed this year (I only review books I’ve liked), including Brian Aldiss’s Affairs at Hampden Ferrers, which I reviewed for The Guardian but which for some reason they decided not to run. I remain a great fan of Persephone Books who reprint books (mainly novels) mainly by women, though next year they’ll be bringing out a new edition of R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript, a decent piece of sf about mankind doing rotten things to other bits of mankind, published in 1939, when his warnings came a little late. I also did a new introduction to the fine Folio edition of The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr Moreau—The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds were introduced by Iain Sinclair and Bryan Appleyard. Sinclair’s new novel Dining on Stones, which drifts down to the bleak resorts of East Sussex (Hastings, St Leonards) and offers a kind of elegy for the fading seediness which has all but disappeared from London proper. This, Sinclair suggests, is where the imagination goes to die. Indeed, it’s where a lot of rootless or uprooted writers and some Londoners go to die, tramping mournfully up and down the windy shingle, wrapped in grey car-coats, merging slowly with the sea-fog until they disappear, a lost echo, a faded memory.