| Film: Kinsey |
[15 Aug 2006|03:48pm] |
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Bill Condon - Kinsey
It is most peculiar to have very standard plot devices, characters, techniques and questions used a story totally *autre*. Kinsey is the man who made sex public, by publishing volumes of survey data about the sex lives of the American people. He is one of the defining figures of the 20th century, in part responsible for the sexual revolution, despite being a fairly staid scientist.
The film puts forward the thesis that it took such an analytic mind to approach sex openly, his pedantry pushing prudery aside. I wonder if that is true of him. The film actually tries to rescue him from the archetype it makes of him, by giving him a deep respect for love and a deep care for others, but I don't think it entirely succeeds in undoing its own work.
It is a shame it's not a better film, but it's still an important film to have: it would be very easy to forget what sex used to be, and what it can still be now.
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| Book: Theft: A love story |
[15 Aug 2006|03:48pm] |
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Peter Carey - Theft: A Love Story
Peter Carey is one of those widely-regarded TEH BEST AUTHOR EVERZ! He's won the Booker Prize twice, treats a wildly different subject with every novel, while remaining an authentic and distinctive Australian voice. He is really, really brilliant, and I look forward to each new book, excited to see what he'll turn his hand to next.
Theft is about the New York art world in collision with rural Australia. God knows how we came up with that combination, but it's fascinating. It's also about the co-dependent relationship between two brothers: one a once-famous artist, and the other what is something like an autistic savant. And it's also about a great and passionate love.
The book is written in the two different voices of the two brothers. In their style and in what they say Carey creates two rich, comple, satisfying characters. He produces also great poetry from both mouths; the descriptions of art are especially bewilderingly gorgeous. The philosophy in the book most often comes from Hugh, the shrewd autist, whose passages on the human condition are astonishing. Unfortunately, I've already returned this book, or I'd type up the beautiful passage that compares his existence to that of the brush hairs and specks of dust his brother has him pick from his canvases . . .
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| Music: Sex Without Love / a war |
[15 Aug 2006|03:45pm] |
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Nathan Asher and the Infantry - Sex Without Love / a war
This is what would happen if Conor Oberst (of the Bright Eyes) were a bit rougher and tougher. Nathan Asher has all of Oberst's cracked passion and gritty folk poetry, but adds to it guitars more powerful and less angst-ridden, despite the equally heart-breaking subject matter.
I don't think this music is as gloriously subtle and various as Oberst's, though it is of the same school. His lyrics, also, aren't as tight, though at their best they are flooring. I don't think this is a fully mature album, though I might be wrong--I don't feel a huge amount of change from their previous work. I hope I'm not wrong, because that would mean even better things to come in the future.
The sample I'll upload this evening is (as all my samples seem to be) atypical of the album, but truly stunning. It's a soft and repetetive song, a description of a person's life in a lullaby. The words are so well-crafted as to make every image appear in your head. You must listen to them carefully, as the most powerful and revealing moments come quietly amongst the rest of the words, as they do in life. The final line uses a brilliant technique: the rhyme we assume is coming doesn't, in exactly the same way the protagnoist of the song struggles to face up to what the episode is really about.
You Cannot Quit Smoking (sendspace)
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| Film: Good Night and Good Luck |
[14 Aug 2006|04:53pm] |
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I was excited to see this film after Angels in America, as it's about Ed Murrow, the broadcaster who took on McCarthy. It payed off, too: I got to hear Joe Welch actually say the "Have you no decency?" line.
It's utterly brilliant, but it's not a film. It's an essay, or a eulogy, or possibly a documentary, but not a film. It was brilliantly tightly structured, shot on gorgeous black-and-white film with a beautiful smooth jazz soundtrack, but it wasn't a film. I actually cannot explain what that mains, but that seems the best appoximation of what I felt about it, and a few other people I mentioned that to knew what I meant.
One of the contributing factors was the fascinating (and very postmodern) contrast between the crisp, sleekly-shot images and the chaotic script and acting: if you closed your eyes it sounded like a piece of realist theatre, but if you closed your ears it looked like the slickest of film noirs. This tension worked perfectly, and made it, in some way, something entirely new in cinema.
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| Game: Second Sight |
[14 Aug 2006|04:51pm] |
I bought a GameCube on eBay for £28 a couple of weeks ago, so occasionally shall be adding a game review to these ages, though I'm not much of a gamer.
This game saw the Timesplitters team turn their hand to a plot-driven 1st-P gun game. That team is unrivalled at making the fighting aspect of gun games truly brilliant, and they added to this one some pretty damn cool psychic powers, like telekinetically throwing the scenery around and the ability to possess NPCs. They added in ragdoll physics, too, which made flinging your enemies into walls a lot of fun.
The plot is at times totally enthralling, with a truly stunning dénoument, though nothing as good as, say, XIII. It's one of those "let's see what fucked-up tricks we can play with time" plots, and is pulled off rather neatly. I was particularly impressed with the way they used the time-tiwsted plot to give the game a moral distance from any of the nastier antics you could get up to, like shooting defenceless psychiatric patients in the balls. Not that I did, of course.
It all got me wondering, though, about just how much we let game plotters get away with: far more clichés than we would allow in film, I think. And when they could come up some very clever twists, there really is no excuse for, as an example, Russian guards speaking heavily-accented broken English to each other.
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| Music: Begin to Hope |
[11 Aug 2006|04:01pm] |
Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope
My first reaction to this was, "What the fuck has happened to Regina Spektor." I was not happy at all. This is because the first couple of songs on this album are complete duds. Worse than that, they're not even Regina Spektor duds. Something's happened to her, and I think it might be a producer. There are annoying pop beats and, worse, guitar-driven choruses. This is not what I want to hear from Regina Spektor.
She has an extraordinary voice with real versatility, and an ability to play it like a percussion instrument, turning the words into beats and slides while jumping all over the place on a sublime melody. And she writes poetry. And she hammers at the piano as if it were trying to kill her, even when she's playing softly. This is what I want to hear from her. Fortunately, most of the rest of the album produces that, with some extraordinarily moving songs. Occasionally, the more synth-driven stuff (which is about two fifths of the album) even works, adding a new dimension to her work.
I am, though, worrying about her. I've never been fully satisfied by her albums, and I've been hanging on for her to produce the one she deserves. Now, if she's not careful, it may never come.
Aprés Moi (sendspace)
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| Book: Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back |
[11 Aug 2006|03:38pm] |
Moazzam Begg - Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back
I've seen Moazzam Begg speak, alongside Philippe Sands the lawyer specialising in international law, at an Amnesty event about torture and rendition. He does little but tell his story; there is not so much rhetoric there. This is a very valuable thing to have.
His story, if you didn't know it, is that he was an innocent British Muslim abducted without charge from Pakistan by an American intelligence agency and then held for three years, most of which was spent at Guantanamo Bay. It's an extraordinary story.
He doesn't write very well (and puts out some appalling poetry), and has a certain opinion of himself, and I don't think he's exceptionally deep in his intelligence, which can be frustrating. His ideology (and he does have one, though it is not that of a terrorist) gets very little sympathy from me. But it is a book which must be read, because these are things we have to know. To have vague ideas about torture and rendition floating around is worth something, but they must be made into concrete stories told by real people in order for enough people to understand what the current state of the world means. We desperately need to know the people this "war" on terror effects, and what stories these new laws can make.
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[02 Aug 2006|09:41pm] |
Jackie Kay: Wish I Was Here
Lesbians! Lots of them.
This is a book of stories about love (as opposed to love stories), and most of the love is gay. Reading this makes it all the more striking how few are the books with gay female protagnoists. Jackie Kay, though, is one of Scotland's arch bufties (along with Carol Ann Duffy), so it was only to be expected. One of the problems with these stories, in fact, is that a lot of the lesbians sort of mush together into one uber-lesbian, because many of her characters are far too alike.
Some of these stories are utterly transcendental. We get cracking opening lines like:
"It is not so much that we are splitting up that is really worrying me, it is the fact that she keeps quoting Martin Amis."
And we get beautiful passages like:
"'It must be lovely to be decisive,' I say wistfully. 'Musn't it? Don't you envy the people that make decisions and stick to them?' he sips his coffee, considering. 'Yes and no,' he says after some time, 'yes and no.'"
On the other hand, some of the stories, especially when she's aiming for authentic Scottishness, are awfully laboured. (The other side of the lesbians being too similar is that she has real trouble making male protagnosists sound real). There's a distinct problem amongst Scottish writers trying to add a flavour into their stories but not really pinning down what Scotland means. Scotland rarely suits words.
When it works, though, her writing has a perfect mix of earthiness and lyricism. Poets (which is what she was first), especially modern poets, seem to be surprisingly good at that: making their words both beautiful and straightforward. I will read more of her books to search for more varied characters and further sublime moments.
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| Film: A Man of No Importance |
[24 Jul 2006|11:14am] |
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Suri Krishnamma: A Man of No Importance
It's good, and a little strange, to have a film set in Ireland without a mention of the Troubles. The subject instead is Albert Finney--well, Albert Finney playing a Wilde fanatic. It's ostensibly about a Dublin bus conducter who is trying to stage a performance of Salome with his bus passengers, but the plotling which struggles to emerge is about the emerging understanding and struggle with his own homosexuality.
It's a fascinating character study: what the man does is channel all of his urges through an intense love of Wilde, which governs his own behaviour and the way he lets his sexuality manifest itself. He feels that if only he can be Wilde he will, somehow, be alright.
The film is filled with utterly charming characters played through utterly charming performances (Michael Gambon doing something utterly unique for him), and is moving and hopeful in a special way. It's not a masterpiece, though, and I was regularly plagued by the feeling of something lacking--I think, perhaps, more history and motivation from the characters. The characters are great, but all of them, including the protagonist, lack explanations for their character, leaving them as just that--characters. It's a worthy and worthwhile film, but so much so that it deserves to be much better.
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[24 Jul 2006|11:13am] |
Christopher Morahan: Clockwise
A standard John Cleese affair, with an uptight obnoxious character who gets caught up in a spiral of total chaos: it's one of those carefully plotted comedies where a series of only slight, believable absurdities mount up into one huge absurdity which, had it not been led up to so carefully, would be unfunnily stupid, but instead is glorious.
There are serious pacing problems, with the writer (the normally perfect Michael Frayn) dropping the ball on a surprising number of occasions, and also serious style problems, with dips into surreality and satire which distract from the main thrust. I also don't think John Cleese's character is quite obnoxious enough, though his sympathetic nature does allow Frayn to insert a couple of quite moving and inisghtful monologues about desperation. Acting is at British best throughout, though, and it's worth watching at least once for a number of stunning jokes and serious belly-laughs.
Great cameo from Joan Hickson as a dementing grandmother who [i]never stops talking[/i].
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| Film: Mad Max |
[24 Jul 2006|11:11am] |
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George Miller: Mad Max
It's Australian, so all the grotesques are far more original and interesting than they would be from any other country, but I just don't think I'm cut out to watch action films.
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| Book: A Man Without a Country |
[21 Jul 2006|12:52pm] |
Kurt Vonnegut : A Man Without A Country
I seem to think that I really like Vonnegut, though I cannot recall a particular book of his that I actually liked that much. How peculiar. I wonder why this idea is in my head.
I like Vonnegut's outlook on the world. It's definite and honestly conveyed, always; we always understand who he is and where he's coming from. It's a particular breed of pessimism which should be easy enough to grasp on reading just a few of his books. His direct style with those short sentences and devestating non-sequiteurs is always enough to let us know what he's thinking, and there's a subtle art to it as well.
I think he says some astonishingly accurate things about people and politics, in that same style, but I also think he comes out with some complete tripe. Sometimes his simplicity is spot on, and sometimes it's horrendously over-simplified. This is very frustrating.
The problem is that I've never been a fan of idolising directness and honesty. I think there's a huge arrogance to it: this is what I think, and look how honest I'm being about it, so how can you possibly argue. The problem with being given the straight dope is that sometimes you just think it's wrong. The acceptance of other ideas is never there in honesty.
This book is too slim and too straightforward to be anything like the searing satire and analysis that we'd hope from the subtitle "A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America". Nevertheless, it's worth the hour-long read for the few great insights that are there.
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| Book: The Book of Daniel |
[21 Jul 2006|12:52pm] |
E. L. Doctorow: The Book of Daniel
This digressionary American epic is a fictionalised account of the life, trial, execution and world of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the only Americans to be executed for spying during the Cold War. I was particularly interested to read it after Angels in America, where Ethel appears to Roy Cohn in his last days. The period -- McCarthyism -- fascinates me for its terrifyingly lethal absurdity; and it is a hugely significant period for the world today.
It's immensely dense and packed with so many different types of writing that it's difficult to navigate your way around it. It's so very huge that extracting single themes from it is borderline impossible -- an ironical final section has the eponymous narrator, the fictional "Isaacsons" son, saying he was going to talk about the questions and messages of his narrative, but was interrupted by a revolution.
This means that there's a huge amount to be got from the book. It's an encyclopaedia of ideas in striking literary style. It's not, though, a format which generally appeals to me greatly: I prefer tight works with direct questions and answers; its sprawling amorphousness is off-putting at times. I also find some of it overly self-indulgent on the authors part: I think it would have benefitted from a good editor.
Nevertheless, the ambition and execution is breathtaking; the style individual and darkly beautiful. There's also a striking honesty about sex in it -- pointing out in exactly the same way as Ludmilla's Broken English the way the impulse permeates everything, and the way that thoughts of sex intrude into every strange thing in life. This has a particular pull for me, this kind of writing. Most of all, though, I'm glad for the insight into the period and the understanding the book gives. History does not pack neat messages (though sometimes I feel literature ought to), and so if a fiction is going to manage historical description and atmosphere, perhaps it has to be like this.
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| Book: Poppy Shakespeare |
[12 Jul 2006|11:32am] |
Clare Allan : Poppy Shakespeare
There are a lot of loops in the worlds of film, books and music, and different places keep me in different loops. Here in Orkney, without a broadband connection to check Hype with, and without a decent cinema, I'm totally disconnected from the worlds of film and music, but our excellent library keeps me up to date with what's happening in the book world. Down in St Andrews, though, I'm completely disconnected from new publishing in books, while I know the minutiae of alternative music scenes across the world. When I was in Vanuatu, I left everything behind for two thirds of a year. Still, whenever I find a loop again it's neve rhard to get back into it.
When this book was published I was out of the book loop. Apparently, though, it was hugely hyped and widely applauded. One of the advantages of being out of the loop, then, is being able to avoid all the hype and approach a good book without the pressures of conformity or rebellion.
When writing the book, it must have been hard for Allan to keep One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest out of her mind -- because this too is a story of a sane person trapped in an insane mental health system. It is, however, a very different book, exploring very different issues with only a little overlap, so comparison would be unfair.
The book combines a satire of the ongoing privatisation and league-tabling of the British health system with a touching story of friendship. The former is handled well, and given an extra clever spin by the slightly unreliable first person narration. (I love well-executed misleading subjective narration -- what Nabokov does so well.) The satire is made by combining surreality and fantasy with nasty truths: the perspective is from a gently mad mind.
It also struck me how unusual it is for a book to explore a genuine and ordinary female friendship. You might think that were a commonplace theme, but it's actually not, in my experience and the way this friendship develops is deeply heartwarming.
The book has messages with just enough ambiguity to avoid both obscurity and being didactic. It's touching and thoughtful, and the author's insider understanding of mental health gives it an irreplacable touch of authenticity. The narration is sometimes laboured and hard to get through, and occasionally the descriptions of the world border on cataloguing, but it's still well worth a read. I only hope you can make it through the hype.
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| Music: Black Holes & Revelations |
[11 Jul 2006|09:04pm] |
Muse - Black Holes & Revelations
Ah! -- it's more Muse. I got from this album exactly what I expected to get from it: surges of passion, mindfucking guitar trance, dirty and sexy beats and bass, an epic scale. I expected the album to have a cohesive sound that was different from all Muse before, but still recognisably Muse -- and it did, the new spin this time being that it sounds like they've been listening to hardcore trance.
And, of course, being everything that I expected makes it slightly disappointing. I would love Muse to totally shock me, rather than just satisfying me. I would like them to play football with my head. They may well do so yet, but in the meantime they're still sticking somewhat to a formula, albeit a great one.
It's not quite as formulaic as, say, Absolution. There are more different types of song, for a start, rather than that standard Muse trick of building up from breathy obscure vocals over dreamy electronics to massive chugging anhtemic guitar. On the other side of the balance, the lyrics have descended to the truly daft -- they read like a selection of pseudo-apocalyptic sentiments and pseudo-empwering political life messages have ben pulled at random from a hat.
It's great music, it really is. But I'm still left wanting more.
Here's a totally unrepresentative but truly brilliant sample:
Soldier's Poem
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| Album: The Eraser |
[11 Jul 2006|08:47pm] |
Thom Yorke: The Eraser
We were all quite excited by the prospect of this, weren't we? What was Thom going to sound like without the rest of Radiohead? The answer seems to be: much the same. He's just stripped out most of the guitars and added in a few beats. It sounds like Kid A mated with an Aphex Twin album.
This is by no means a bad thing. It's a very good album. It's not what we might have feared: self-indulgent experimentation. He's trying to communicate something to us, he's trying to make us feel, and he certainly does.
The absence of Radiohead allows his introspection full flow: all the anger and urban paranoia of the band is there, but it's never allowed to vent -- it bubbles beneath the surface of the music. It's trapped by claustrophic beats and loops, and his desperate wheedling falsetto is a tiny vent for a huge stream of emotion. The music implies everything, giving you very little to work with: there's intense beauty here, always just out of reach, always a little subdued -- and all the better for being so.
That is what I hear him as trying to do, at least. However, the truth is he's not hugely experienced with the medium. He's trying hard, and he does succeed, but he's not at home enough in it to do everything hew could. In fact, this sounds very much like his Pablo Honey: if he keeps going with the project we may well see his music reach the extraordinary heights that Radiohead's has now.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the album artwork is among the best of all time: a beautiful lino-cut of London in deluge on a metre of pull-out cardboard sleeve.
Download: Skip Divided (sendspace)
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| Film: Equilibrium |
[11 Jul 2006|08:44pm] |
Kurt Wimmer : Equilibrium
I'm not going to talk about everything that's wrong with this film. If you're interested in the ways the plot doesn't make sense, the utter derivativeness of all its ideas, the absence of excitement in its flashy fight scenes, the complete failure of all the actors to convey what they're supposed to convey, and so on and so forth, then check out the IMDB comments on it. What I want to do is demonstrate how to read the film, which is something I find horribly few of my friends do: how to extract the ideology which lies behind the film and the ideas it's trying to give you.
It angers me that so many film-watchers don't know how to extract these meanings from a film, because it means the films are insidiously forcing these ideas into their minds. Unless you're aware that something is being said to you, you can't challenge it: if it's said without you noticing then the connections make it into your mind. It frustrates me that people don't watch the films while aware enough to make these judgements. It also reviles me that it's entirely possible that film-makers often don't encourage you to.
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| Film: Death Becomes Her |
[10 Jul 2006|09:20pm] |
Robert Zemeckis: Death Becomes Her
First of all, understand that for years I thought this film was "Death Becomes Her" rather than "Death Becomes Her" -- as in "Death turns into Her" rather than "Death looks good on Her". Whoops. Anyway, it's about two fading rival beauties (Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn) who both take an eternal youth potion and then both accidentally die -- leaving their bodies ever-decaying but still animate. Bruce Willis plays the plastic surgeon who completes the love triangle.
The acting's cracking throughout, and it's especially great to be reminded that Willis can play a hopeless nerd as well as a sensitive tough guy. The script is frequently hilarious, and the production is very slick. It's sexy when it should be sext and ridiculous when it should be ridiculous. It even has in-jokes for those in the know, like spotting Andy Warhol and James Dean in the party of eternals. It's a very competent film.
But I have little to say about it, because I simply couldn't read it. I couldn't give it a gloss from any analysis. And this, because it's meant to be a satire, is a serious problem. In order to be a satire it has to be consistently satirising something, but apart from a little dig at vanity, you're left laughing at very little. It's like a series of good jokes strung together without being used to tie anything up. Which is a shame, as it had the potential to smash a lot of vanities apart.
For what I mean by "reading" a film, just wait until you see what I thought of Equilibrium, which I watched last night.
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| Book: Flesh in the Age of Reason |
[10 Jul 2006|09:06pm] |
Roy Porter: Flesh in the Age of Reason
This was always going to be the perfect book for me, combining my two greatest interests: Enlightenment philosophy and mind/body duality/unity. It's the last book Roy Porter ever wrote, published posthumously and tragically without endnotes -- the crew of historian friends couldn't reconstruct them from the notes he left behind. It was universally adored by the press, and rightrly so: it's a masterful history of the period which more than any other has defined the field of thought about our flesh and soul.
The book takes the form of a series of case studies of thinkers and writers from Descartes to Byron, passing through luminaries such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson as well as relative obscurities like Lord Shaftesbury and David Hartley. The book also takes tours of a few broad areas of thought, like gender and autobiography. The structure makes it extraordinarily readable, because each chapter is a complete whole, but from cover to cover it also constructs a compelling alternative narrative to the hackneyed standard tale of the Enlightenment: that it spawned individuality as a concept, established the mastery of the mind over the body, and ushered in the Industrial Revolution through its materialist underminings of spirituality. There is, the book shows, far more to it than that.
What's most astonishing is the range of thought about body and soul that ran throughout the Enlightenment. There was simply no dominant philosophy, and, particularly, materialism is yoked as often to Christianity as it is to atheism, and dualism seduces the philosopher as well as the theologian. Through it all you get an understanding of why we think now as we do: the book reminded me that another reason I love philosophy is that it shows our most commonplace beliefs to have astonishing pedigree. (And when you know they are inherited you start to question them all the more.)
The only problem with this book is its scope. Sure, we get a chapter about Scotland and a chapter about gender, but it's very much not a full history of the Enlightenment but rather a history of the male English Enlightenment. Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others are largely missing from its pages. I don't understand why this approach is taken, and it's peculiar that Porter doesn't issue a caveat about it at the beginning, as he's a brilliant enough historian both to know of the other Enlightenmnet narratives and to always outline the limits of one's scope. So we have a beautifully complete narrative of male English thought, and I only wish it was so complete across the rest of the Enlightenment. Perhaps, if the great writer had not died, he would have written that book, too.
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| Book: Ludmilla's Broken English |
[09 Jul 2006|10:36pm] |
DBC Pierre -- Ludmilla's Broken English
Look at that cover? What does it look like? Soviet kitsch. Eastern European sex. Cold war fucking. A truly outdated medium.
I knew DBC Pierre from his stunning Booker-prize-winning Vernon God Little, so I was expecting a lot from this book. He's a truly anarchic writer whose talent is to make an absurdist plot believable enough to be scathingly satirical, hammering you with a unique and hilarious writing style in the process. And from that cover I was looking forward to his take on an old topic.
The book's set a couple of decades in the future. A privatised British health service has just severed the first pair of adult conjoined twins. And, somehow, their story is connected to that of a peasant family caught up in one of the last ex-Soviet civil wars. The plot is a rude reminder that the Cold War still echoes; that the two great European ideologies haven't stopped smashing into each other, and that the collision of cultures is still crushing people.
The book brims with sex. Lots and lots of sex. Communism and captialism are reduced to powerr-plays, and power-plays are reduced to sex. The book's climax is explicitly obscene, but no more so than all of the writing that's led up to it. Everything is described in sexual metaphors, but everything:
"The known worldended at heathrow airport. Tunnels connecting the underground railway station to Heathrow's terminals were an extension of London's damp innards, the vaginal tributaries of a lovely old whore, couching her punters all the way to the world's edge, not thrusting change so quickly upon them that they suffered shock. The airport this started slowly, graduating itself from bare concrete to shopping-temperature light, to eventual angelic sunshine."
This leads up to a denoument where the characters finally bring to the surface all the sex that's been brimming all the while. It's a climactic cataclysm, the finale, and one that leaves you reeling. It leaves the world knocked out of orbit, too; Pierre rains hammer-blows down on the thought that underpins this planet, exposing it as cruel, conscienceless and driven by sexual greed. And he makes you laugh.
The only problem with it is also the problem with Vernon God Little. The book proper finishes at that climax, with the tendrils of a few questions still waving in the air, leaving the reader's intelligence to work out the rest. But he gives you one more chapter, a chapter in which everything is given a satisying resolution. It's a clunker of a thing to do. It's as if the author couldn't quite cope with leaving his characters in such a depressing mess, despite that being the right place for them. So he gives them an afterlife after the book proper, in an epilogue which certainly does fit in terms of theme and plot, but which is unsatisfyingly satisfying. And though it's tacked on to the end of the book to allow you to pretend it doesn't exist, it still does, and taints a little what goes before.
Only a little, though. It's one of the most devestating fictions I've read in a long time, and is all the better for being eminently entertaining and readable.
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sickmanofeurope's journal