Tim Roux's Blog – October 2009 Archive (5)

Bob Ellal’s ‘By These Things Men Live’ comes with a sucker punch in the final chapter (no, he doesn’t snuff it) but I shall declare my conclusion immediately. It is exquisite.



It plays towards one of my prejudices and against another.



The one it plays towards is my preference for novellas. You probably know the reply of the writer who was asked why his book had come in at seven hundred pages – “Because I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” Bob did have time and it… Continue

Anthony Burgess used to claim that he wrote his novels to symphonic notation and Steve Sangirardi freely admits that as far as he is concerned sound trumps meaning, an attitude which is self-evident in his writing, not for any lack of meaning but for the prominence of the grandiose ebb, flow and swell of his compositions.



Steve publishes in slim volumes so although he loves to blow up a passage until it sounds like a full philharmonic orchestra flat out and hell-for-leather, perhaps… Continue

John Joss is a writer for whom rigour and integrity are all: the rigour of the imagination, the rigour of minutely layered detail, and the rigour of linguistic precision. He clearly abhors short-cuts, laziness, vagueness and sloppiness and, in many ways, almost a lifetime since being invalided out of the Royal Navy where he trained as a pilot, he is still a military man in his essence, fascinated in equal measure by the truth and by the fiction of life as it surrounds him.



The… Continue

In his previous excellent venture, ‘Geometers Of Intellect’, Steve Sangirardi provided some of his takes on the world through the lenses of religion, the literary classics and the everyday. Many of these takes related to the complex and uncomfortable counter and cross currents of marital and family life.



In his new set of seven stories, ‘Life On The Planet’, those same lenses are applied to focus on obsession, specifically obsessive self-destruction. Even more specifically, given… Continue

Some novels are great in that they console you that you are not alone, even if the people you realise you are in the company of are all paddling for their lives in the deepest of deep shit, inadvertently splashing each other wildly in their frenzy, and searching for the rock bottom that has not yet been sighted and may not even be there for the next foreseeable stretch of the sewer.



By this criterion, among several, this is a great novel.



This book is indeed a rocket - it… Continue