Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A powerful read, 30 Jul 2009
This is an extraordinary book. I sat down with it and devoured it in one sitting and then came up for air, feeling as though I had been savaged.
It is written in verse, but it's a very free verse which doesn't intrude upon the reader, and after a few minutes it is easy to forget that the lines don't always go to the edge of the page. The language is familiar and direct, and causes no complications. Having said that, the writing has all the power and concentration of good narrative poetry. Though the story is hard-bitten, it is the verse that really packs the punch. And what a punch!
This is a werewolf novel. Whatever instinct it was that made Toby Barlow think of writing a werewolf novel in verse, it was a good one: the book works spectacularly well. It works because verse - good verse - can do something that prose can't. It can concentrate feeling and cut straight to the essentials. In 'Sharp Teeth' it goes for the jugular and doesn't let go. There's no messing around here, no unnecessary detail, no asides or elaborate descriptions, no self-indulgence, just the bitter narrative of a story that needs to be told.
'Sharp Teeth' doesn't trade on the magical or mysterious. It's a werewolf novel told in a realistic style. Its characters and settings are modern and recognisable. Its passions, although they run high and wild, stay within the bounds of ordinary human experience.
Yet, like any good werewolf novel, it's full of a savage sensuality: It's viscious and it's violent. It reeks of blood, eroticism and desire. It looks at the passions that bind people together and drive them apart. It looks at the tension between the individual and the pack. And it looks deeper still: fuelling all this is a powerful undercurrent of unfulfilled need and animal frustration.
The book uses the werewolf story to examine the hard, gritty realities of modern urban life: sex, jealousy, survival, competition, status, the need to keep one step ahead. Above all, it looks unflinchingly at the dehumanising power of the modern social environment. And yet, in an emotional landscape where there is not much warmth or compassion, it tells a deeply compassionate tale.
Oh, and there's a darn good story line in there, too.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A truly stunning debut, 7 Sep 2007
With Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow has written one of the most stunning, compelling and at once violent and compassionate books that I can recall ever reading.
Filled with passion, wrenched apart by unrequited love, written in plain verse that reads as effortlessly as breathing (or as a graphic novel without the graphics), it is almost surprising that the tale of Sharp Teeth is so contemporary and so real - especially when you consider the fact that it concerns rival gangs in Los Angeles (but think Robert De Niro's intelligently structured gang in the movie, HEAT, not some bunch of fools) who just happen to be able to transform themselves into wolves and wild dogs who run in the canyons and arroyos of Southern California's nighttime wilderness. To call this a werewolf story is to reduce it to a pointless and totally insufficient label.
Lark, its central character, is a man of finely tailored clothes and still more finely tailored thoughts and emotions. The Girl (for she is never named, nor should she be) that he loves is damaged and wild and finds feeling and brief solace in the arms of one Mexican-American dog catcher named Anthony, whose own soul is as complex and driven by passion as both the woman he loves and the man (Lark) who so completely and unconditionally loves her.
There is savagery here, in the transformations from human to animal, and surprises, whether it be the iconic Surfer Pack, with its seductive Annie (filled with the warm innocence of a summer night, yet every bit as primal as those with whom she runs), or the Bridge Tournament in Pasadena, attended by the perfectly-named (like every single character in the book) gang members Cutter and Blue, which strikes echoes of Chandler and Hammett at their sly, dry, sardonic best.
Or, for the sheer joy of the prose, take this, from when The Girl first meets Lark ("She's leaned on Lark for so long now/you'd think it was love"):
"The talk went on until the moon disappeared
and she bit her lip and looked down and knew that
whatever it was, she would agree.
But he kept talking,
until she finally wanted it so bad,
she could feel the night's darkness
vibrating inside her."
The intelligence and intent of the book can be sensed in the epigraphs that open each section of the narrative. For example, at the start of Book One, Walter Benjamin's "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism," transposed with Warren Zevon's (RIP) "His hair was perfect."
But perhaps the love and loss, the power plays and empathy and sheer manic energy of this explosive, wholly original modern day myth, are best captured by the quiet simplicity of this quotation from Plato, which appends Book Four:
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Toby Barlow has done what all writers, not least all new writers, dream of doing: he has redefined a literary form and made it his own. And created magic in doing so.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Award Winnings, 9 Aug 2007
It's a novel-in-verse. No don't stop reading it's not what you think. We'll I'm not sure what you think but if you are imagining some Shakespearean-esque poetic purple prose you'd be wrong.
These are no clichéd moon-howling-hounds - they are myths made real. As with the best urban fantasy, this highly original novel-in-verse grounds itself in reality. So much so you might not look at a stray dog the same way again. You are going to be hard pressed to find something as complete and compelling as this for a while. My only doubt is how Toby Barlow is going to top this. If Sharp Teeth doesn't win a few awards I'd be highly surprised.
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