Andrew > Recent Status Updates

Pages 16 to about 160 i think are some of the best, most savagely brilliant, astonishingly insightful, meticolously observed prose I've read on the emergent yuppie middle class (still in incohate form in 75) and the latent tendencies for affulent capitalist societies to degenerate into fascism. Actually astonishing how prescient it is. The last 50 pgs now seem to drag terribly. Its momentum has just vanished

Btw the goodreads thing here is fucking wrong. Its 149 pgs not 213! Who puts these fucking books on here.

Goodness me Barker is really something else. His bombastic, almost archaic style of writing at times is nevertheless brilliant, its proper literature applied to an often "trash" genre. And god, Barker really gets the horror of the flesh. Out of the 3 stories read so far, not 1 has been immune to some kind of excruciating physical agony. Its such sensous horror. Its brillant.

So far decidely mixed. 1st story is fantastically written and grotesque in character, but has no plot. 2nd is great, beautifully written, tender and poetic, with a nice twist. 3rd is just bad, arguably both racist and sexist, and the obvious twist isnt even done, instead ending in an empty thud. I Am Legend may have overhyped my expetations. But certainly Mathersom is leagues above his contemporaries in style.

"Many of the oaks had fallen or were close to death. The old wood was dying on its feet."

"From the old wood came an ancient melancholy...They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end; to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all things" - Lady Chatterley's Lover,pg.68

Eerie the way thimgs echo

Quite astonishingly written, especially so for a Guardian journalist, who tend to have the emotional imagination of fleas (though Monbiot, along with Owen Jones, have always been leagues beyond what that newspaper can provide). But too much bloviating travelouges and autobio crap. I dont care for nature writing, i find it too wishy washy, and the forays into a kind of spiritual quasi mysticism is eye rolling.

The writing is consistently excellent. But christ its boring. Theres no plot at all and an awful lot of waffling. Immediately apparent: the way the romance is becoming a microcosmic exemplar of the wider destruction of Edwardian norms; the terror of Bolshevism, sci fi visions of a dystopian future straight out of Zamyatin and Huxley, the ruins of the interwar economy. Laced with class and gender taboos.

Just shoot me. Honestly, dors this waffle ever end?

I think ive found the cure for insomnia - give someone any novel published before 1900. Christ almighty this tedious, mind numbingly boring stuff. Unending constant waffling, endless, constant tedious fixation on details at the expense of narrative. Its the literary equivalent of the runs - it just streams out without form or pause. Fuck me

Whats immediately apparent reading this is how similar the structure of finance is to the mafia, to the point that, if this was fiction, youd accuse it off plagarising Goodfellas. We have the ingrained ultra masculine bonding, the excessive dinners and drinks, the way you earn your status through a big trade and establishing clout, the way getting "fucked" is an equivalen for getting whacked.