Bomb Culture

Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall. Perhaps not his finest book but the most famous and much easier to get hold of than some of his flimsy books of poetry and biographies. Although I didn't study literature at UEA I was lucky enough to do my thesis on Nuttall who was also a performance artist, jazz musician and actor. To this end I conducted a long drunken interview with him in Todmorden wearing pyjamas and sporting bright green hair (me, not him). I was going through a punk phase and very much into anarchic counter-culture. I was there when Malcolm Bradbury's History Man went into TV production (and recognised some of the thinly disguised characters in his satire on modern universities). Unfortunately I never met Kazuo Ishiguro who was studying there at the time with Malcolm and Angela Carter. Ian McEwan and Anne Enright (the latter I'm reading at the moment) had just left and were starting to make a name for themselves.

Here be dragons

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of those novels that had everything going for it from my perspective. Mythology, landscape, self-discovery through a journey and the sense of understatement and restraint that comes from a Japanese sensibility filtered through Englishness in the early writing courses at the University of East Anglia. But frankly it is the writing style that is the problem here. It's not a literary approach versus a hack sci-fi/fantasy problem as I think high and so called lowbrow are useless concepts when it comes to assessing quality, as are genres. By which I mean it is useless to try and assess something by a set of aspirations to which the author never aspired to in the first place. The problem is that the style is deliberately clunky. In trying to emulate the sing-song declamatory style of epic myth the dialogue is stilted and the narrative laboured. It probably would have been a much better book if Kazuo had dashed it off more quickly and less self-consciously. So for what it's worth KI write again soon.