The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society discussion

Is Ann Quin Hamilton-esque? I'm hoping some of you will be able to tell me.





Here's some interesting information from a 2007 article in the Guardian...

Berg is a beautiful novel: it is dark, esoteric, haunting - sometimes disturbing. It is saturated with detail, particulars and minutiae. A novel of voices and voice. The best novel ever set in Brighton in my opinion - forget Patrick Hamilton (as splendid as he is), Ann Quin's Berg is the real deal. It cuts through the superfluous like acid and marvels in the seamier mystery all our seaside towns, and especially Brighton, keep hidden. For an insight into what British literary fiction could have been if we'd only have listened, I'd start with Berg by Ann Quin every time.

The whole article is here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/book...

Another excerpt...

Quin was born in 1936 in Brighton, one of our more interesting seaside towns (she died there too in 1973: swimming out to sea one morning by Brighton Pier never to return to our shores again). Four books were published in her lifetime: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969), and finally Tripticks (1972). Berg is her most famous (and possibly my favourite). It is a paean to the Nouveau Roman of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, eschewing the literary trends of her day: those angry, realist campus yawns that put the British working-class voice on the literary map. Ann Quin's was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and - dare I say it - ultimately European. It looked beyond the constructs of our society. It was fresh, alarming, and idiosyncratic. It wasn't static; it moved with the times.

I came across her through this Tumblr feed:
http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/t...

I've just finished...





Berg by Ann Quin

Review here....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

And I too have just finished Berg. I didn't mind the experimental writing, but the content hardly merited it. Review, for what it's worth, at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

The reason for posting this is to note that Berg was, bizarrely, made into a film, called "Killing Dad". Anyone seen it? With Richard E. Grant as Berg, Denholm Elliott as Dad, and Julie Walters as his girlfriend Judith, I assume it was played for laughs (the book has all the material for a cheap farce). But I am in no hurry to buy the DVD...

Thanks Peter. I agree with all that you said in your review. Never seen that film and won't be rushing to put that right.


I saw a Berg inspired installation in Brighton by artist Anna Dreamer...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3eAedaCY...

It was brilliantly executed and brought the book to life. She did one for Hangover Square a few years earlier which was, in my view, a much more worthy book for her talents.

Berg by Ann Quin is the latest book under discussion for the Backlisted Podcast

It makes me wonder if I misjudged it slightly, as they were all so positive about its merits

Interestingly Ann Quin was name checked in an article in the Guardian Review section on Saturday that is not on line at present. It's by D.J. Taylor (works work I have enjoyed) and is about 1960s avant garde/experimental writers.

D.J. Taylor has put together a BBC Radio 4 programme called The Advance Guard of the Avant-garde which will be broadcast on Saturday 10 March 2018...

In the 1960s a group of writers set about shaking up the polite conventions of the British realist tradition through a whole range of experimental approaches.

Sound poets created some of the strangest programmes ever broadcast by the BBC, while the likes of BS Johnson cut holes in the pages of his novels - and in the case of his book 'The Unfortunates' published the unbound chapters in a box for the reader to mix up and read in whatever order they wished.

Johnson and similarly minded writers like Ann Quin, Bob Cobbing, Alan Burns and Christine Brooke-Rose were prominent in their day, appearing regularly on TV and radio programmes, but by now they've largely been forgotten.

Using some of the rich archive these writers left behind, D.J. Taylor sets out to tell their story, with the help of Johnson's biographer Jonathan Coe, editor of a new Ann Quin collection Jennifer Hodgson, novelist Eimear McBride and poetry critic Jeremy Noel Tod.

In a programme that borrows some of their techniques Taylor argues that while we may no longer talk about this group of determinedly experimental figures, many of today's most prominent writers, from David Mitchell to Alice Oswald, owe them a debt of gratitude.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tybwl

Most if not all of these novelists feature in Francis Booth's Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1980, whilst the books he discusses can handily be found in a GR Listopia list at https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7... .

Despite a liking for innovative and experimental fiction (at least in principle), I have to confess that the few novels I have read by this group of authors have not always left me thrilled and delighted, or even shocked and dismayed.

Perhaps we have both misjudged Ann Quin's Berg, but I don't think so. Her Tripticks may be more interesting - but unless it turns up very cheaply in a charity shop, I don't think I shall be investing in a copy. Much the same goes for Alan Burns. I read his Celebrations some time ago (review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), but I didn't think it offered much in return for the challenge it presented to the reader. Again, his other books may be more interesting, but...

Eva Figes is another one. Read Ghosts (review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and wished I hadn't, though it was short. And there are others that I have tried, but that's probably enough.

Novels by Christine Brooke-Rose are sitting on my shelf, as yet unread - and I did quite like the one book I read by B.S. Johnson - so maybe I have just been unlucky and it will all come good in the end. Or maybe my intellect is not up to it - though I'm damned if I'll admit to that.

Thanks, therefore, for the link to the D.J. Taylor programme which I shall try to catch. Sounds interesting.

Thanks Peter. I am reassured to read that I am not alone in wondering what I might be missing - and concluding it might be more "emperor's new clothes" or old clothes in this instance.

I will definitely be listening to the radio programme as, whatever the merits of their output, I think the writers themselves are quite intriguing people.

Just up at the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Thanks Patrick - a very enjoyable comments section under the article too