The Space Between Things
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Space Between Things for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Every city in Britain has its Moseley, the edgy, arty Birmingham anti-suburb where the studes and crusties come to rent and squat. Charlie Hill's intelligent and witty The Space Between Things captures their culture with brutal, unpretentious clarity. His novel charts the years between Moseley s first rave and the height of the road protests, an age of well-meaning self-indulgence, where the partying never ends but the politics never quite get going. It is, like the suburb itself, playful, unruly and bursting with generous energy. --Jim Crace
What I like very much about this novel is that it vividly captures a moment in Britain's recent past, and takes us inside a world and a milieu which most readers won't have known before. And of course, as a tragic love story, it packs a considerable punch. --Jonathan Coe
What I like very much about this novel is that it vividly captures a moment in Britain's recent past, and takes us inside a world and a milieu which most readers won't have known before. And of course, as a tragic love story, it packs a considerable punch. --Jonathan Coe
Product Description
How far would you go to win the love of a woman? Arch, a wannabe poet living in a bohemian Birmingham suburb, likes to party and has no time for love or seriousness. Then he meets the mysterious Vee. They have a one-night stand and she leaves him the next day with a challenge: throw yourself into the world and its possibilities. Discovering that Vee has gone to Croatia to photograph the war, Arch begins to expand his horizons. As the government clamps down on road protesters, new age travellers and the free festival scene, he throws himself into the subsequent campaign of civil disobedience. But will it be enough for the returning Vee? The Space Between Things is a satirical love story set in the social turmoil of the early 1990 s. It is the first fictionalised account of the road protest movement.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Thatcher has just gone and Arch goes out to party with his Moseley mates. There he meets the poetic Vee who he ends up spending the night with. Arch is used to getting by between dole cheques and smoking skunk, whereas for Vee life is more than this.
Then Vee disappears and over the next year, Arch only has the occasional postcard from Bosnia, though she leaves a lasting impression on him as he rises her to her challenge to throw himself into the world and its possibilities. He gets involved with the techno festival scene and its vibrant underculture of doing your own thing, coming together, being creative, playing music and reclaiming the common land for travelling, partying and living.
What follows are parties in disused properties and landmark road protests and other demonstrations including Twyford Down and anti-Criminal Justice Bill marches which I too was involved with, albeit very peripherally. Then Vee returns and becomes involved in the direct action and gets deep and meaningful with Arch. But what does she really make of the change in Arch? And what of her work in Bosnia? Why is she so enigmatic?
The writing is rich with the slang and expressions of the time many of which have filtered into everyday parlance: chill out, keep it fluffy, ambient music etc.
This is a vitally important and well-written book with plenty of wit, and just as relevant now with sinister developments in government, oppression of opposition, and suppression of news coverage or misrepresentation of news on a far wider scale. They thought they were changing the world, but the sinister grey men are back in power with knobs on.
Then Vee disappears and over the next year, Arch only has the occasional postcard from Bosnia, though she leaves a lasting impression on him as he rises her to her challenge to throw himself into the world and its possibilities. He gets involved with the techno festival scene and its vibrant underculture of doing your own thing, coming together, being creative, playing music and reclaiming the common land for travelling, partying and living.
What follows are parties in disused properties and landmark road protests and other demonstrations including Twyford Down and anti-Criminal Justice Bill marches which I too was involved with, albeit very peripherally. Then Vee returns and becomes involved in the direct action and gets deep and meaningful with Arch. But what does she really make of the change in Arch? And what of her work in Bosnia? Why is she so enigmatic?
The writing is rich with the slang and expressions of the time many of which have filtered into everyday parlance: chill out, keep it fluffy, ambient music etc.
This is a vitally important and well-written book with plenty of wit, and just as relevant now with sinister developments in government, oppression of opposition, and suppression of news coverage or misrepresentation of news on a far wider scale. They thought they were changing the world, but the sinister grey men are back in power with knobs on.
Format:Paperback
This brilliant novel evokes a lost, awkward age but reading it is so vivid it makes it seem like now. In any case its themes are hugely relevant to today.
The atmosphere and the feelings are portrayed with just the right amount of telling detail, brought to life and made engaging. Reading the Space Between Things is a joy.
The atmosphere and the feelings are portrayed with just the right amount of telling detail, brought to life and made engaging. Reading the Space Between Things is a joy.
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
The Space Between Things begins in a Birmingham suburb on the day in 1990 when Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street.
"We were sitting in a campus pub, The Pot of Beer, when we heard that Thatcher had gone. She was in tears, the bitch. Our first thought was 'where's the party?'
The party was in Moseley, two-and-a-half Embassy filter out of town on the number 50 bus."
It ends four years later, in a field in Bosnia. Between is everything that was bizarre and wonderful and weird and cracked in Britain under Thatcher's grey Spitting Image successor: weed, bifters, skunk and e; free festivals, ley lines and raves; new age travellers, cheesies, anarchists, fluffies and crusties; the techno beat; squats and vegan cafes; Twyford Down, traffic cone hotlines and the Criminal Justice Bill. Even the characters' names bring back memories: Smurf, Vee, Stripe, Sorrell, Ig and Mickey the Sleeves. Charlie Hill weaves it all together with a confident irony:
"In the off-licence I saw Cheesy and Smurf. Cheesy was trainee Brew Crew, a lunch-out soap dodger. He was buying a four-pack. Smurf was a young traveller. They were coming up on something. It looked as through the head tunes sounded good. Their faces were ticcing in time.
'You alright, geez,' I nodded, 'geez.'
'Just off to a party,' they said."
...and sometimes arcs into a tranced poetry:
"And then in the van on the way back to Brum two days later, post-ecstasyed, vital toxins trickling down the cracks in my crazy-paving brain, I thought about the party, the people and the dancing in tents with space lights and lasers and the black sky at night with explosions in the sky and how it had been a great party, the best of all parties, but also of what else it had been, how those crazy days - yes, those crazy days - had gone beyond parties and were more, were a coming together that you might have seen if you'd put the graft in, a coming together of dissipation and energy and exploration, of me and Tom and Stripe and Sorrell, of walking through the fire and the world and its possibilities..."
And in amongst all this is a love story.
"Vee's gone now but she's there in the stillness of the day. She's there in the chatter too, alive even as it deadens my senses. She is the loudest and softest part of the chatter, like the beat in my head and the poetry I once recited and every time I hear her I feel as though I have discovered the great yes all over again..."
Vee is the outsider, the one who puts the partying in perspective. For the narrator Arch, would be poet, would be roads protester, would be velvet revolutionary, she alters everything. Hill pulls off the double trick of allowing his characters to change and allowing them to fall short. Like Doris Lessing's post-war activists, their solidarity fragments into factions and their idealism comes to seem just a bit daft.
A great read, full of fresh energy and insight.
"We were sitting in a campus pub, The Pot of Beer, when we heard that Thatcher had gone. She was in tears, the bitch. Our first thought was 'where's the party?'
The party was in Moseley, two-and-a-half Embassy filter out of town on the number 50 bus."
It ends four years later, in a field in Bosnia. Between is everything that was bizarre and wonderful and weird and cracked in Britain under Thatcher's grey Spitting Image successor: weed, bifters, skunk and e; free festivals, ley lines and raves; new age travellers, cheesies, anarchists, fluffies and crusties; the techno beat; squats and vegan cafes; Twyford Down, traffic cone hotlines and the Criminal Justice Bill. Even the characters' names bring back memories: Smurf, Vee, Stripe, Sorrell, Ig and Mickey the Sleeves. Charlie Hill weaves it all together with a confident irony:
"In the off-licence I saw Cheesy and Smurf. Cheesy was trainee Brew Crew, a lunch-out soap dodger. He was buying a four-pack. Smurf was a young traveller. They were coming up on something. It looked as through the head tunes sounded good. Their faces were ticcing in time.
'You alright, geez,' I nodded, 'geez.'
'Just off to a party,' they said."
...and sometimes arcs into a tranced poetry:
"And then in the van on the way back to Brum two days later, post-ecstasyed, vital toxins trickling down the cracks in my crazy-paving brain, I thought about the party, the people and the dancing in tents with space lights and lasers and the black sky at night with explosions in the sky and how it had been a great party, the best of all parties, but also of what else it had been, how those crazy days - yes, those crazy days - had gone beyond parties and were more, were a coming together that you might have seen if you'd put the graft in, a coming together of dissipation and energy and exploration, of me and Tom and Stripe and Sorrell, of walking through the fire and the world and its possibilities..."
And in amongst all this is a love story.
"Vee's gone now but she's there in the stillness of the day. She's there in the chatter too, alive even as it deadens my senses. She is the loudest and softest part of the chatter, like the beat in my head and the poetry I once recited and every time I hear her I feel as though I have discovered the great yes all over again..."
Vee is the outsider, the one who puts the partying in perspective. For the narrator Arch, would be poet, would be roads protester, would be velvet revolutionary, she alters everything. Hill pulls off the double trick of allowing his characters to change and allowing them to fall short. Like Doris Lessing's post-war activists, their solidarity fragments into factions and their idealism comes to seem just a bit daft.
A great read, full of fresh energy and insight.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Nice one geez
I hung back from reading this novel - not least because as a long time Moseley resident I wondered how the place could be used as a backdrop without some kind of distortion. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Toerag
"Just what is it that you want to do?"
Take a headlong dive into the heady mess of the early 90s. Your guide will be Arch, a well-meaning lad - dry, poetic, earnest. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Spiralise
'Old skool, innit?'
This brought back into focus lots of things that I'd forgotten. It reminded me of living in shared patched-up houses, when it was all about drinking and dancing, extremes of energy... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Lou Galvin
A time and place distilled
'The Space Between Things' tells the tale of a time between eras - between the era of Thatcher and the alternative music scene that had provided a type of commentary on and relief... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Gen G
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
