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Amazon.co.uk Review
Toby Litt's third book is all bullet entry wounds, violent emotion and forensic detail. Corpsing works as a deconstructed literary thriller, a very knowing examination of the pathology of the genre. It starts off in the traditional way, with a death. Jean Luc Godard said 'all you need for a good story is a girl and a gun.' In Corpsing the girl is Lily, a beautiful actress and the ex-girlfriend of Conrad, the narrator. The gun is in the hands of an assassin, dressed in bike courier clothing who looks like "a vision of the future--a future where everyone is concerned with keeping their bodies fit and dodging between fast new technologies of damage." He fires at Lily and Conrad as they eat dinner at fashionable Le Corbusier, a restaurant which resembles an autopsy room in the morgue: "the tables are a frosty-looking aluminium, the walls are half mirror, half stainless steel". Six bullets later and the damage is done, Lily is dead and Conrad is nearly so.
The dissection really begins when Conrad comes out of hospital and begins investigating Lily's murder, his own near miss. The plot unfolds in short, sharp chapters, keen as knives. Toby Litt uses Conrad to provide an extra twist to the usual serpentine story. He has a morbid interest in the clinical details of the results of his injuries. He, like Litt, is very aware of the etiquette of cool violence, a cultural culling that takes in J F K succumbing to the "magic bullet", Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and, of course, Reservoir Dogs. Corpsing is an interesting critique of our fondness for violence and death as entertainment, while cunningly providing us with all the gory details, the damage done. Clever, but a little soulless. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The first bullet entered the body of my ex-girlfriend - gorgeous, slightly-famous Lily - two inches beneath her left breast. We were sitting at a table in Le Corbusier, Frith Street, Soho. As the first bullet went into her, I turned to look at the gunman. Wearing Day-Glo Lycra, a helmet, mirror shades and a pollution-mask - just like a bike courier - he had a black and silver gun in his hand. And he was shooting the woman I still loved...
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Copsing (nearly) corpses,
By A Customer
This review is from: Corpsing (Paperback)
This is a book of three thirds. The first third is well-written, leisurely in pace, attentive to detail and sustains the interest. The second third feels rushed, with little care given to fleshing out some secondary characters (Lawrence and criminal comedy-stylist Smart come to mind), leaving the reader with cliched caricatures and pedestrian narrative and dialogue that on occasion reminded me of a 15 year-old's self-indulgent attempt at "serious" writing ("He put on the album "In Utero" by the rock band Nirvana", grated particularly).The final third goes a little way towards redemption, as the writing becomes tighter and Litt burrows deeper and deeper into Dead Lily's psyche, presenting us finally with the image of a totally inept human being. And the ending? Faintly ludicrous but better than I'd anticipated.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dreary,
By A Customer
This review is from: Corpsing (Paperback)
Dull - starts adequately but then dwindles into something that passes time on a bus but otherwise fails to engage the imagination.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fails to deliver.,
By
This review is from: Corpsing (Paperback)
This book starts in great style with a Tarentino/John Woo esk description of a hit at a restaurant.After this early promise I got more and more irratated by the increasingly unbelievable antics of the central character. While the ending of the book is a total anti-climax. Avoid!
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