books reviews
A BOOK OF DAYS Patti Smith (Bloomsbury, £22.50)
Through many decades of art, mu- sic and fashion, Patti Smith has unquestionably reached icon sta- tus and is still as popular as ever – thanks somewhat to her Instagram page where she began by sharing everyday images of her kids, her half-finished coffee and her Ab- yssinian cat Cairo. The author of books including Just Kids was in- spired by this social media format – and now her latest title, A Book Of Days, portrays an image for every day of the year, with small reference captions that are both equally mov- ing and humorous.
for landfill. Gubby rescued them, curated a compilation and became increas- ingly fixated on Radiophonic lore – spinning this into various semi-fic- tionalised accounts of its history, incorporating tribute albums, fes- tivals, a play and an illustrated zine, which forms the basis of The Delaware Road. Pairing Gubby’s script with illustrations by Jarrod Gosling and Nick Taylor, it should not be mistaken for a pat introduc- tory guide to the Workshop. Rather, thinly-veiled versions of real-life entities (including composers Delia Derbyshire and John Baker, plus the BBC itself) battle for the upper hand: the proverbial Swinging Six- ties, but in a dystopian Britain with an occult undercurrent. Niche yet accessible and engag-
ing, The Delaware Road is further notable for its packaging, which in- cludes postcards, a tiny (playable!) vinyl record and even a sealed pack of tablets “to be taken in a radiation emergency only”.
NOEL GARDNER
Celebrating life, love, death and style, the book even goes beyond Smith’s own archives to reveal a beautiful and diverse collection of old Polaroids, phone snapshots, portraits of notable figures and friends’ gravesites spanning dec- ades. With the added captions, you yearn to know more about the image, the people in them or why certain objects mean so much to her – although the ambiguity only adds to the charm of it. A Book Of Days is a deep explo- ration into a fascinating mind, with a familiar yet original way of shar- ing images and text that highlights the beauty of Patti Smith’s life and proves this artist still has much more to give.
JOHN EVANS
THE DELAWARE ROAD Alan Gubby (Buried Treasure, £17-£28)
HOLLYWOOD: THE ORAL HISTORY Sam Wasson & Jeanine Basinger (Faber, £25)
than this.
HANNAH COLLINS LOKI
Melvin Burgess (Coronet, £16.99)
with social and political issues, in a broader sense, with a focus on sys- temic inequality.
It has a dystopian setting; a city- state called Town, where residents are categorised into one of three cat- egories: Citizens, L2s, anyone else. The area is governed by a board of faceless puppetmasters known as the Ministers, who hold all the power and none of the culpability for their cruel decisions, decisions which affect our protagonists, a group of interconnected outsiders living in the Saha Estates, a strange, independent accommodation based on the outskirts of Town. Saha starts promisingly, with a
Sprung from the molten heart of an ancient ash tree, torn open by a celestial storm, a version of Loki that might surprise those who have grown up on the old stories. Melvin Burgess’ first-person interpretation of the trickster god opens up a new, more empathetic view of a charac- ter equally admired for his cunning and reviled for his treachery for centuries. Known for his award-winning,
thriller-like premise – a dead body in a car – and it ends with a thrill- er-like climax, but sadly, the narra- tive between these sections is too scattershot to be fully engaging. It is a novel told through several per- spectives, and there is a sense that Nam-Joo set too many plates spin- ning, and that a more focused nar- rative would have been a stronger conduit for her ideas.
JOSHUA REES
young adult fiction, Burgess’ switch to take on the myths of Loki and his fellow denizens of Asgard is a de- parture. It’s certainly written for an adult audience and pulls no punches in its depictions of the often ghastly Norse myths; all mud, bloody dis- memberment and “maggots as big as badgers”. But the shift in focus suits Burgess’ writing: his prose is electrical, crackling with a mischie- vous charge, as befits the nature of its title character.
The Delaware Road, reasonably described as a graphic novel while not being solely that, is recom- mended to anyone curious about topics including British counter- culture, hauntology and electronic music. Alan Gubby very much is, and has played a leading role in the reappraisal of the BBC Radio- phonic Workshop – famed for their 1963 Doctor Who theme music, but as recently as 2006, vast hours of their original tapes were destined
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Hollywood is one of the most fa- mous places on the planet and as such, works chronicling its his- tory could likely pave the Walk Of Fame, and then some. So what makes Hollywood: The Oral Histo- ry any different? Well, it’s the first of its kind to transcribe and collect the spoken recollections of a broad spectrum of those from the Ameri- can industry, from big name direc- tors and actors to no name crew members that do all the hard graft. These recollections come courtesy of the American Film Institute and they “speak with the attitudes of their own time, but they speak with authority.” Compiled by film historians and authoritative voices in of them- selves Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, cracking into this 700-pag- er feels like stepping into the library of Alexandria, or maybe the world’s best dinner party for film buffs: everyone from Charlie Chaplin to JJ Abbrams has something insight- ful to say about their unique craft; their candidness making Golden Age quasi-myths feel tangible. As such, it’s quite an epic, perhaps not something for a single sitting nor for those who need a lot of contextual background – but for anyone fasci- nated by the inner workings of the full industry hierarchy, you won’t get the literary truth any straighter
THE WITNESSES ARE GONE Joel Lane (Influx, £8.99)
The patchiness of the source ma- terial gives great license to a writer of Burgess’ verve and imagination. His depictions of the monsters of the early days of the earth, or of the slums inhabited by young gods are vivid and memorable. It’s clear that for all of its often jarring subject matter, Burgess had loads of fun writing about this world. His im- aginative portrayal of Loki casts a fresh light on a much maligned and, maybe, misunderstood character.
HUGH RUSSELL SAHA
Cho Nam-Joo (Scribner, £14.99)
Originally published in 2009, The Witnesses Are Gone delves into life and death, gaslighting, the oc- cult, film, and nuclear power in its modest page count. The protagonist moves into a dilapidated house, where he finds a series of VHS tapes containing ominous and un- settling films by a director called Jean Rien. This sets in motion a quest to uncover more information on the mysterious director and his work, which leads from the West Midlands, to London, Scotland and eventually South America. There’s a strong leftist message
opposing the war in Iraq, nuclear energy and the policies of Blair’s Labour, which ties the search and subsequent
Cho Nam-Joo’s previous novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, was a powerful examination of every- day sexism and its effects on one woman’s mental health. The book flew off bookshelves and earned its author worldwide acclaim. Nam- Joo’s new novel, Saha, also deals
WMDs to the search for a truth be- hind the mysterious nature of Rien’s films. The overall feeling of the story is one of lingering dread and uncertainty for the future, life and death and the search for the truth. Though not a horror in the more obvious sense, there is a weird un- dercurrent of the characters operat- ing in a liminal space somewhere between life and death, with the only people able to shed any light, the witnesses, nowhere to be found. The story ends with more questions than answers, and a feeling of not belonging anywhere.
lack of evidence of GARETH MOULE
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