Demob Happy

Cinematic masterpiece 9/10 The Power and the Glory is arguably Graham Greene’s masterpiece and is one of the greatest books written about Mexico by a gringo (see also Malcome Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy). As with much of Greene’s ‘serious’ literary works (as opposed to the so-called ‘entertainments’), the narrator’s internal [...]

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Doing the locomotive with Paul Theroux 8/10 People tend to either love or hate Paul Theroux, and although I can sympathise with his detractors I belong to the former camp. He is an uncompromising author that calls things as he sees them, refusing to romanticise or sensationalise his experiences. Although he comes across as a [...]

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House of the unholy 7/10 This novel typifies Vargas Llosa’s non-sequential narrational techniques and his use of alternating dialogues to portray scenarios that are separate in space and time. A willfully experimental and uncompromising author that goes to great lengths to disorientate and unsettle the reader, The Green House is one of his most challenging. [...]

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I am…. not that impressed 6/10 There is no denying Tom Wolfe’s capacity for writing deepy compelling fiction with modern relevance, but I would complain that his narrative structure is becoming a little formulaic. You could draw a graph to map the similaraties between ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, ‘Man in Full’ and this, his tale [...]

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