Parallax View Book Review Compendium

Well, Anja has a new website, but typically, by the time I've linked to it, she's too busy to update it again. She ran a poll asking the question - vivid gay sex in literature - yay or nay? and naysayers would be well advised to avoid Brass by Helen Walsh, as its opening chapter features its 19-year-old student protagonist Millie paying cash in order to orally pleasure a young prostitute in a Liverpool cemetery, and later has her inserting the bottom end of a lager bottle into a much older lady of the night. Cheers.

Thanks to the educational properties of my inbox I've become familiar with the acronym MILFs for 'Moms I'd Like To Fuck' so maybe we need a similar acronym for this generation of terrific-looking authors (Zadie Smith, Monica Ali et al) of whom part-Malaysian Walsh, with her dusky looks and fantastic breasts, is the latest addition - NILFs (as in novelists I'd like to...), maybe? To be fair, Walsh has an interesting and colourful past as a teenage red light fixer in Barcelona before working with socially-excluded youngsters in Liverpool. She's put that time to good use as her writing sings with the local dialect and she's able to write about a troubled youngster with a lack of condescension that allows the reader to feel compassion for a character with such unappetising predilictions.

It's tempting to glibly summarise Brass as a Looking For Mr Goodbar for the alcopop generation, but whereas Judith Rossner's 70s classic rewarded her promiscuous teacher with a violent bludgeoning, Walsh depicts Millie as young, vibrant and intelligent enough to deserve, if not a happy ending exactly, some sort of optimistic resolution. Millie is a believably complex character, cynical enough to exploit the local brass in appalling ways, yet still innocent enough to derive simple pleasures from 'bonny night' and trips to the Welsh coast. My only criticism would be some of the motivation for her extracurricular behaviour is a little too pat, but overall this is a fascinating, involving and moving read for those with a strong stomach who are not easily offended.

Maggie Gee, an elegant blonde lady in her fifties, probably qualifies as a NILF for the viagra generation. The Flood is a dystopian novel in the Ballard mould, set in the near future of a slowly-flooding city where the rich live in affluence at a higher level while the poor contend with the rising water levels below and all the dirt and disease that goes with it. Meanwhile the city's President Bliss, a charismatic but misguided man, is too busy concentrating his efforts on an unnecessary war to keep his eye on looming natural disasters on his own doorstep.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's supposed to. Gee doesn't waste time on subtlety in her use of a fantasy scenario to illustrate her anger at the way the country's currently going. The book uses characters from her previous novels in The Flood, but this didn't stop me from enjoying it, although you do have to concentrate hard while working through the busy plotting of a large and intertwining cast of characters in the first 100 pages or so. It's good to see a novelist bold enough to rage at such 'old-fashioned' concerns as social injustice and the chasm betwixt rich and poor, and furthermore be unafraid to steer the plot towards its logical, dark conclusion. Recommended, particularly if you share her disillusionment with modern society.

Just to show I don't only read books by authors I want to sleep with, I also caught up with Bay Of Souls by Robert Stone, who wrote one of my favourite books of the 80s in A Flag For Sunrise. Despite a swish cover, his latest is a bit of disappointment - a vaguely noirish tale of a nerdish college professor lured by an exotic colleague into voodoo and political intrigue on a fictitious caribbean island. It's readable enough, but in the final analysis it just didn't make any sense to me - Stone spends the first half of the book providing the main character's backstory but then renders this insignificant with the sub-Greene chicanery of the second half, where the character appears to completely change for no reason. Maybe there's a higher intelligence at work than I can understand, because to me this felt like a first draft in major need of a re-editing overhaul. Dispiriting - if you're a Stone fan, I'd suggest waiting for the paperback.