Bit of Bovver

‘The graves (in Abney Park Cemetery) heave up from the ground like the teeth of a badly dentisted but black-hairedand winsome girl.’  Gothic scenes and a fearsome wit infect Tim Wells’  Skinwolf in London tale:Moon Stomp.

Bit of bovver

The debut novel begins innocently as protagonist Joe Boshover, prefers suspenders and red gingham to any 'bovver' and lives with his parents in Stoke Newington. Things rapidly build to a head when Lena Lovich infects Joe with a lover’s bite at a heaving punk show though and the young printer is soon howling through the cobblestoned streets from Hackney to Smithfield’s Market. Moon Stomp is not late night Hammer Horror thriller filler or schlocky 60’s/70’s era kitsch either. "Wotcher," is word on the street in the ‘never quite sure who is behind you’ world of young bovver boys on the town. The mindset is Thatcher-era early 1980’s; punks, rastas, skinheads pack in clusters around Farringdon clubs. Essex bands like Puncture and punks The Ruts keep the heaving sex and thrill seeking Joe and mates Dennis and Irish Philip, 'Flipper' sated in their nightly escapes from union jobs in the print trade. Story aside which drives ahead with the pace of a mosh pit, narrator Joe Boshover imparts the story with a likeable but take no prisoners working class narrative which by the second chapter has Joe inhabit the form of a menacing, snarling, hirsute, prowling beast of the Hackney Marshes. Teen Wolf this is not and any memory of cheeky Michael J. Fox be damned. Joe has ‘tude  in spades.  He sizes up competition,  is opinionated about the company ‘e keeps like a poet early doors at a gig. This works well and the humour sparkles. ‘He was keen on fanzines, which Joe liked about him, but also Adam and the Ants, which Joe didn’t.’  A narrator ready to trade zingers but also not looking for trouble either is a winning start and we soon side with Joe as his alter ego chomps through Abney Cemetery with howl at the moon, abandon. Although a slim volume, ironically not much bigger than a book of poetry, Moon Stomp is a page turner with some eyebrow and hair-raising scenes. The London poet's spare style works in the new leap into fiction. 

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Man on a white horse?

Consider the Lilies by Iain Crichton Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The title almost put me off but was hooked soon enough. And who are you to ask anyways you stunning excuse for a man? (Anyhow that is the tone of the old dear and I just loved it.) Aside from the feisty old lady who rules her old farm house, it is about the Scottish clearances - and the exodus to NS and other parts of Canada. The old lady is notified by a fat man 'on a white horse' that she is about to be kicked out of her farmhouse where she has lived all of her life, and is suitably indignant. It is very poetic with rural images that last and has elements of Brian Moore's "Lonely passion of Judith Hearne" and Margaret Laurence's "The Stone Angel".



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Down and out with Russians in Paris (and London..)

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Working in a busy hotel kitchen as a busboy/dishwasher 'plonguer'in 1930's Paris is hard work as the detailed accounts of the stress, heat and pandemonium in the Paris hotel kitchens attest; young Eric Blair describes the turbulence of the political climate in 1930's Paris with a strange youthful stoicism, especially the exiled world of down at the heels but still proud Russian Émigrés. Switching countries, the London tramp scenes don't quite have the same flair as the scenes amongst the working waiters and plongeurs in Paris and the matter of fact style will do little portray tramps as people with their own hard luck stories however this grim style is also very effective and takes you deep into the hard boiled luckless world of the petty thieves 'screevers' and 'glimmers' of London. The descriptions of tramping in and around the East End offer telling insights into the interior worlds of faceless men when one admits 'there is never anywhere to sit down for any length of time'. Before he was Orwell, Blair was a young man, trying to make it pay. The two epochs come to life in all of their dingy and grimy resolve to press on through hard times.



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Haliburton V

 As the clock clicks down to the greatest sports event this year the London Chapter of North America's oldest literary society, The Haliburton Society, invites the best local wits and verbal talents to three days of verbal Olympics in East London:

With top Canadian and British writers
Todd Swift, Gabriella Apicella, Patrick Woodcock,
John Stiles, Sara-Mae Tuson, Catherine Brogan, Fiona Curran, Dante Micheaux, Grim Chip and many more...

Olympic Connection? 
 Road to Olympics?