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Product Description
Review
Excellent reviews:
‘A major work indeed’
Today
‘Smith delivers that rarest of commodities: a genuinely new twist with a punchline of Crying Game proportions’
Time Out
‘A storytelling skill that can only be described as pure genius’
Venue
Product Description
Michael Marshall Smith’s surreal, groundbreaking, and award-winning debut which resonates with wild humour interlaced with dark recollections of an emotional minefield.
Stark lives in Colour, a neighbourhood whose inhabitants like to be co-ordinated with their surroundings – a neighbourhood where spangly purple trousers are admired by the walls of buildings as you pass them. Close by is Sound, where you mustn’t make any, apart from one designated hour a day when you can scream your lungs raw. Then there’s Red – get off at Fuck Station Zero if you want to see a tactical nuclear battle recreated as a sales demonstration.
Stark has friends in Red, which is just as well because Something is about to happen. And when a Something happens it’s no good chanting ‘Duck and cover’ while cowering in a corner, because a Something is always from the past, Stark’s past, and it won’t go away until you face it full on.
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Customer Reviews
And this is more than that. This is in my mind one of the most understated and important novels of the last 15 years.
I also hate the usual cliches reviewers use when discussing a great book; "unputdownable" and " a real page turner" spring to mind. Yet this is a book where these cliches totally apply. As others have said, I lost sleep and missed a whole day of college to read this book. It was simply that fantastic, and I've never before or since been so entralled and captivated by a book.
Stark is a fantastic character and MMS is a master of the first person narrative. This book is also intensely funny, (you will laugh out loud), violent, beautiful, revalational, upsetting, and truely horrific. The ideas presented are phenomenal - mind boggolingly brilliant.
To describe this as Sci-fi is completely missing the point. The book is a hybrid of genres carefully woven into one another, encompassing, to name a few, elements of the Gothic, fantastical, satiric and horror traditions.
The writing is superb. Any criticism of clumsiness is misfounded. If it is ever clumsy, it is intentional to portraying Stark's human character. Re-read this and you will realise the writing is carefully crafted and beautifully sublime.
Plus, all the appliances talk! In one of the early chapters an elevator is said to be being treated by a "SWAT team of hydrolic psychotherapists" for "insinuating damaging things about the sexual proclivities of the building's interior designers..."!!
Absolute genius.
All I have to say is read this book. It will honestly immerse and affect you like no book has before!
Comparisons with other authors are both trite and unecessary; no-one writes like Smith who started his creative career at Cambridge footlights, then writing for magazines and writing short stories before embarking on this incredible book. A story that draws you in and in turn provides humour, adventure, violence, love and freindship, dreams, zany futuristic talking machines (which leads back to humour) and cats. Cats are an important part of Smith's life and the sharply portrayed cat, Spangle, in this novel is the cat he wishes he had when he wrote the book.
The book bristles with imaginitive ideas about a future where the country is divided up into neighbourhoods where you go to live the lifestyle you want. A neighbourhood where no sound is allowed apart from one part of the day when everyone can scream their heads off; one where everyone is very busy and has to spend all their energy getting-things-done; one where violence reigns; one where colours are wild, vivid and the environment changes to reflect mood and clothing; one that is for cats.
It's a world that demands to be revisited. Once is not enough for this book. Do you yourself a favour, read this incredible adventure.
No time to stop, so I will just point out that I remember it being utterly... Read more
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