The Brandy of the Damned [Kindle Edition]

An increasingly mesmerising hybrid of engaging travelogue and unsettling genre elements, The Brandy Of The Damned defies categorisation. It sees three former members of a rock band head off on a tour-van journey around the coast of Britain, for reasons which escape them. We learn their motives as they do. Why's one of them carrying a shovel? Why's another of them so obsessed with bottles which wash up on the shore, containing pages from a future Bible? To say more about any of this stuff would be to spoiler, but TBOTD is sure to surprise and move you.

At one point towards the end, I felt like I'd been shown one of nature's great hidden secrets. Surely there can be no higher recommendation than that. Buy this book and become part of the early groundswell of recommendation which is sure to propel it from Kindle to Kindle to Kindle.

I like this book. What's not to like? It's easy to read (I read it one sitting), cheap, entertaining, funny, moving, surprising and completely original. There is no other book quite like it. But what I like most about it is that, despite the fact that some unbelievable things happen within it, it has its own internal consistency and is somehow deeply satisfying.

It's a bit like a fairy story. In fairy stories magical events occur which exist outside the scope of normal reality. Trees have spirits. The venerable stranger grants wishes. The hero is lead into a mysterious and often threatening world where strange things happen.

The Brandy of the Damned has something of that quality. There are a series of magical events, in the form of little blue bottles which appear intermittently throughout the story, which contain chapters from a future bible. Various things occur which exist outside the scope of normal reality. But there is a light touch to all of this, and we never find our credulity strained.

Our three characters - all ex members of a band which broke up twenty years ago - are on a journey around the coastline of Britain. But, while the place names stay the same, you soon realise it is a mythical Britain we are travelling through, a Britain of the subconscious, and that the events are occurring on a magical or a symbolic level.

However, just like a fairy story, we find ourselves going along with the logic of this. It is not handled in a clumsy way. The plot twists are frequent enough and surprising enough to make us want to keep on reading, and the characters are real enough for us to believe in them. We care about them enough to want to follow them on their journey, by which we are lead to a series of understandings about our own journey through existence.

In another life JMR Higgs writes scripts for children's TV. What we have here is a child's tale of the imagination told for adults, in a way that is both entertaining and beautiful.

I have no hesitation in recommending this book.

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!

Higgs' travelogue is an eye and mind opening trip around the island of Britain. From it's starting page to the finish it covers topics as diverse as music, brain programming, cognition, conditioning, fiction, religion, coincidence and empathy. It's a short book, and can be read quickly, but I'd recommend a second reading and possibly one or two breaks! When I'd finished I was left with a lot of questions regarding the story - reflecting on those questions, and why I'm asking them, has been almost as pleasurable as reading the book.

I laughed, got annoyed with Higgs for suddenly veering from what I expected, laughed a little more, was shocked and appalled, and ended up worrying for the future of the books characters. Higgs managed to flesh out his heroes sufficiently via narrative and first person descriptions to make me feel that they were as 'normal' as me. The use of a narrator also worked extremely well, despite being what initially frustrated me - for me it highlighted the main aim of the book which I saw as illustrating that there will always be mysteries to us, know matter how much we think we know.

While reading this I was reminded of Cope's The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-Millennial Odyssey Through Megalithic Britain. In Slip Case. and Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising - I think Higgs does a great job pushing my thoughts to two heavy weight books like these while telling a story about a journey on the A roads of England, Wales and Scotland.

Highly recommended!