Demob Happy

Scaling the dizzy heights ?
8/10
It’s impossible to write about Paul Auster’s ‘Mr Vertigo‘ and completely avoid the dreaded term ‘Magic Realism’ - even if it’s a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named Master Yehudi [...]

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Apocalypse redux!
8.5/10
Following on from my post about John Updike’s seminal ‘Rabbit, Run‘, ‘Rabbit Redux‘ is the second in Updike’s quartet of novels chronicling the life and times of America as seen through the eyes of everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Written - as with the other three - at the tale end of one decade (here, [...]

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“He’ll get by without his rabbit pie … run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run”
9/10
‘Rabbit, Run‘ is the first in a quartet of novels by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist that revolve around the varying fortunes of a former high school Basketball champion Rabbit Angstrom. All four novels were written at the end of the a [...]

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Smoke and mirrors
9/10
Todd Haynes’ 2002 film ‘Far From Heaven‘ was a masterpiece of subtle subversion that paid homage to the richly coloured 1950s film style (and specifically the ‘women’s pictures’ of Douglas Sirk and his contemporaries). What could have been hollow pastiche is in fact a thoughtful and moving examination of US social [...]

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