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Fabulous Cillian Press launch party (The wine! The glamour! The magic!) for Alan Bilton's stunning new novel The Known and Unknown Sea at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea - 7.00pm Thursday March 13th. Don't even think about not being there!
The new book is about terrorism, and police-spies and agents provocateurs - an almost out-and-out thriller, but with added metaphysics.
| 5.0 out of 5 stars Just incredibly brilliant , By Amazon Verified Purchase ( What is this? ) This review is from: Flirting at the Funeral (Paperback) I bought this because I liked the title - but it was a great and surprising find. In fact, it's the best novel I've read in several years. In 1974, young students Morgan and Matty went to Portugal to participate in the revolution, but split up when Matty went off with another man from their commune. Matty married him, stayed in Portugal, and became a minor pop star there, while when the novel opens, Morgan, after various relationships and jobs, is working as a tour-guide. Morgan's friend Howard finds a play set in a similar '74 Portuguese commune, and sends it to him. Morgan meets now-widowed Matty in London and passes the play onto her. Matty in turn passes it onto her early-twenties daughter Luisa, who decides to use it for her film-school project. Matty is being kept by Otto, the super-rich but wheelchair-bound owner of a New-Agey health clinic in Southern Portugal, but wants to regenerate her singing career. Luisa and her film-making friends come over to stay at the expensive clinic, with its pool, haute-cuisine and inscrutable staff, and Otto pays all their expenses. Morgan joins them, then Howard and his sickly wife Anne, and then Dave, the play's author, and still an ardent revolutionary. How long will the charming but sinister Otto keep funding them, and what does he want out of it? The contrapuntal dialogue is smart, the tension builds, the glamour is repeatedly built up and then undercut, the characters are varied, real and often amusing and the philosophical and political issues (has revolution just become another form of nostalgia?) are distinctive and intelligent. It felt like Chekhov. Who is this Chris Keil? Why isn't he famous? |
Thanks to Ceri and Gaabi for brilliant hospitality while we were in Portland - coffee, beer, late night TV, limo'd all over town like rock stars; and to Phil and Mike for excellent company. PSU was fun, as was Wordstock: that Chelsea Cain is something else! I SO nearly missed the plane the morning I left for New York - always a sign of a seriously good time, just a notch below being carried on to the aircraft on a stretcher. Next time.
Big love!
The Western Mail is the most radical and politically sophisticated newspaper in the world! Wales at it its best: local, incorruptible, indomitable! Respect! Chapeaux!
My creative writing workshop at Wordstock:
SEX AND THE SERIOUS NOVEL
The workshop will look at the role of the erotic in literary fiction: sometimes moving, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes unintentionally hilarious. Sex is a major part of life; why do so many serious writers have such trouble writing about it?
Wordstock Festival, Oregon Convention Center, Portland
Saturday, October 5th
