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Eating Air (Hardcover)

by Pauline Melville (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £12.99
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  • This item: Eating Air by Pauline Melville

    In stock.
    Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 408 pages
  • Publisher: Telegram Books (14 Sep 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1846590760
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846590764
  • Product Dimensions: 22 x 14.2 x 4.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 266,204 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

'An exceptionally talented writer of prose fiction' TLS 'Pauline Melville is a find - ' --The Guardian

Like Jonathan Coe s What a Carve Up! or Blake Morrison s South of the River, this is a novel about social structure in which characters complete a picture rather than the other way round...Melville does not need to rely on rhetoric or charm. Her clean style and detached vision allow us to concentrate on what these people actually do as opposed to what they set out to do. This is a book about the difference between intention and action and how we are acted upon far more than we know. --Lavinia Greenlaw Financial Times 7th September 2009


Product Description

An attraction to danger prompts Ella de Vries, a stunning obsidian-eyed beauty who dances with the Royal Ballet, to fall in love with Donny McLeod, the Dionysiac rebel and free spirit who 'believes in nothing'. It is the 1970s. They move into a household of political radicals and become casually drawn into extremism. Special Branch infiltration leads to a violent crime that sends Ella into self-imposed exile in Brazil. Donny goes wandering. Over thirty years later Ella returns. The economy is in freefall. A new kind of terrorist is active. The unruly nature of love re-unites her with Hector, a former housemate torn over whether to make common cause with Islamic extremists in attacking a bank. When Donny reappears, Ella becomes the catalyst for a series of events the final outcome of which is as shocking as it is unexpected. Comic and frightening, satirical and poetic, Eating Air is Pauline Melville's most audacious work yet.
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Eating Air
93% buy the item featured on this page:
Eating Air 4.5 out of 5 stars (2)
£9.06
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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Throwing bombs and making love in tumultuous times, 27 Sep 2009
By A Common Reader "Committed to reading" (Sussex, England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
In these days of bland conformity, it is difficult to remember the radicalism of the 1960s and '70s when the Red Brigades bombed and took hostages, Trotskyists infiltrated the British Labour Party, and huge crowds of students took to the streets in Paris. In Eating Air, Pauline Melville takes us back to those days and reminds us of the sheer intensity of political feeling then so common. She describes a house in Bethnal Green which hosts a whole cast of radicals and revolutionaries, and the air is thick with thoughts of striking at the banks and joining with coal miners to march on the centres of power.

The book roughly divides between two time periods, opening in the present day where we catch a glimpse of what happened to some of the main characters since those heady London days, and then zooming back 30 years where we read the in-depth story of their youthful zeal and its outcomes. The final part of the book concludes with a set of startling events which complete this definitely unique narrative.

Eating Air has a wide-cast of characters and the story moves seamlessly from one to another. The action takes place on several stages, but eventually the book homes in on Ella de Vries, a young ballet dancer in the 1970s who gets drawn into radical circles, eventually taking part herself in a series of dramatic events which eventually force her to escape to exile in Brazil. Before her departure, she fall in love with and marries a young Scotsman, Donny, who seems a perfect depiction of Adult ADHD, with his extreme impulsiveness, impatience and temper. One of the mysteries of this book is how the lovely Ella manages to put up with Donny's erratic behaviour over the many years of their marriage, but she seems to find her own consolations in work and friendships.

This is a well-crafted tale. It has many strands of varying complexity, and the split time periods enable the reader to see what happened at the end in a particularly satisfying way. There is nothing sadder than to see how people with such promise fail to amount to much in later life, and it is surprising to see how anachronistic the political radicalism of the period seems today. Pauline Melville shows how the radical baton has now been handed on to Islamic militants who have an uneasy relationship with her atheistic 1970s characters. The parallels are obvious but somehow make the time-worn views of the earlier generation seem fusty and tired.

Pauline Melville is a skilful writer. Despite the wide cast of characters I found it easy to remember who was who (not always the case in my experience!), and the novel moves forward at quite a pace, leaving the reader little time to get bored. I found it fairly unputdownable and was pleased that the book is quite long (384 pages) giving the author plenty of space to develop her themes and to explore them to the extent they deserve.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Amazingly original, but the subject matter makes this a difficult read, 24 Oct 2009
Eating Air is a very unusual novel and I am still unsure as to whether I enjoyed it or not.

The book centres on a strange couple - Ella, a dancer with the Royal Ballet and Donny, a violent anarchist. It isn't long before they become involved in illegal acts and start to form relationships with terrorists. Spanning 30 years and several countries, this is an ambitious novel, which confused me as much as it shocked and entertained me.

The characters were evil and impossible to like. They swore continually and, although there wasn't a great deal of violence, they discussed it and made light of horrific acts. The book did contain a lot of humor, but I felt uneasy about some of the jokes.

"`Personally, I always use violence to obtain my objectives. And that's what will happen when I die. People will stand up and have one minute's violence.' He let out a cackle."

There were a large number of characters, which meant that I sometimes lost track of who each one was and it also took me a while to realise that the story had flipped back/forward in time, as there was nothing to indicate this at the start of each chapter.

The writing was beautiful though. I loved the vivid descriptions which were present throughout the book.

"To his left on the English Channel a fluffy grey angora haze blotted out the horizon. The milky sea gave slow sluggish sucks at the shore."

The ending had a profound effect on me - I predicted it in advance, but when it finally occurred, it was much more powerful than I ever imagined. I think I will remember it for a long time.

Pauline Melville is clearly a talented writer and I think it was mainly the subject matter that caused me to struggle with this book. I am keen to read The Ventriloquist's Tale, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, as I am sure I will enjoy it much more.

If you are interested in the lives of terrorists, then this book would be an interesting choice. The originality of this book should not be ignored and, as it contained a number of thought-provoking issues, this book would be a great choice for a tolerant book group.
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