It's the '90s and Dot, Saul and Owen are living together on the fringes of the Hoxton art scene - shoplifting, dole-scrounging, swapping drugs, clothes and beds. Fifteen years later they are drawn back into each other's lives but can they happily relive the past or will they rekindle the passions that nearly destroyed them?
This is without question the worse book I have ever read. What surprises me is that it was ever published in the first place. I wish I'd never bothered to read this and abandoned it earlier on as this is 8 days of my life that I will never get back.
'It was the video-making, the inability just to live. 'The unrecorded life is not worth living.'
Owen, Saul and Dot, living together in the nineties, in the time of the Young British Artists, cheap sherry, Nirvana ('just a fad'), filth and the dole. This novel is an addictive read, both a hommage and a satire to the art world, filled with sly snd funny footnotes. But the main event is the love and loss between three wild characters. Compelling, fascinating.
Starts off well and then collapses under its own self referential weigth.
Three characters - Dot, Saul and told from the persepctive of Owen - living in the middle of the early nineties art scene in up and coming Hoxton. The book charts their relationships, the sex, jealously, living in squalor with knowing humourous digs at the trendies and the art scene, that Morrison is no doubt a member of.
The early pages are the best - although it comes across as a thinly veiled pastiche of Withnail and I. Saul is a booze hound, the flat is a tip and Owen is the obvious I. This is so obvious it is plaugarism but then the author even mentions the similarity himself. So does that make it alright?
Each chapter starts with a review of a piece of video art produced by Dot and then goes between the current (Dot with Baby, reacquanted) and then mainly in the past telling their story.
The problem is that it goes on too long and I am not sure that anything really happened, or if it did, whether I really cared. Kind of a relief to get it finished and another week long book exercise.