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Satyrday
Paperback
First published April 24, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 23, 2024
"In Guy Manners' world - a fluid and casually violent world - a world obsessed with money, power and pleasure - a sense of unspecified sense of terror was not abnormal. Guy had...money anxiety...career anxiety...love anxiety...Guy...(in general also had) constantly-on-the-verge-of-pasnic-behind-the-wheel-in-a-traffic-jam-anxiety. How much longer could he hold out? As it turned out he didn't have to hold out that much longer...(because he was) About to become in lunacy and barbarity on a global scale...And about to learn what anxiety was really all about. It has been said that the depiction of our contemporary world requires a style...that (is) Disturbing, sharp, darkly humourous, idiosyncratic and vibrantly original (and) dissects the madness and terrors of our world with furious precision...our times have found the chronicler they need."
From the flyleaf of the jacket from the 1986 hardback MacMillan edition as Goodreads has not provided any information or a synopsis/precis.
I loved this novel and while happy to give it five stars I must warn others that my award reflects both a fondness for the book and more specifically the author who I believe is not only a great writer but also a undeservedly overlooked and forgotten one.
As a ferocious caricature of the rich and fashionable this novel is as good as Waugh's 'Vile Bodies' and other classic demolitions of that vaporous and ridiculous class and way better then any of the vapid nonsense produced by anyone today. It is a first novel so its structure and narrative is flawed, the plot overelaborate and the culmination clearly a unsatisfactory wrap of of plot lines and characters that had spiraled out of control and which threatened to overwhelm author and novel. But I can't help liking it, particularly for his grasp of the essential nature of the rich and powerful, their ruthlessness, self absorption and complete moral vacuity. His portrait is also completely familiar and up-to-date. The scenes and the people he fills them with would be utterly at home at any of Trump's vulgar palaces or with the Kardashians. His is a novel of money and power, the old aristocratic names and titles may still have walk on plots but this is the new Thatcher/Reagan/Bush elites. For a novel written in the 1980s it is extraordinarily prescient.
From the flyleaf of the jacket from the 1986 hardback MacMillan edition as Goodreads has not provided any information or a synopsis/precis.
I loved this novel and while happy to give it five stars I must warn others that my award reflects both a fondness for the book and more specifically the author who I believe is not only a great writer but also a undeservedly overlooked and forgotten one.
As a ferocious caricature of the rich and fashionable this novel is as good as Waugh's 'Vile Bodies' and other classic demolitions of that vaporous and ridiculous class and way better then any of the vapid nonsense produced by anyone today. It is a first novel so its structure and narrative is flawed, the plot overelaborate and the culmination clearly a unsatisfactory wrap of of plot lines and characters that had spiraled out of control and which threatened to overwhelm author and novel. But I can't help liking it, particularly for his grasp of the essential nature of the rich and powerful, their ruthlessness, self absorption and complete moral vacuity. His portrait is also completely familiar and up-to-date. The scenes and the people he fills them with would be utterly at home at any of Trump's vulgar palaces or with the Kardashians. His is a novel of money and power, the old aristocratic names and titles may still have walk on plots but this is the new Thatcher/Reagan/Bush elites. For a novel written in the 1980s it is extraordinarily prescient.
August 8, 2012
First read this around 1992, so reading it again throughly evoked the nineties to me. Love this book, even though it's a bit nasty. Bit like life really...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews