AS an avid reader I have been exposed to a gamut of literary creativity and innovation but I felt at the conclusion of KILL (redacted) that I had not read a book but participated in a writing project, an experimentation in technique and intellectual perceptions.
Purists (do they exist in the eclectic world of literary criticism?) may baulk at the format, the technique and devices used by the author --redacted passages lasting as long as five pages of blacked out patches of type, the lack of page numbers and "chapters" that are two to three long.
But spare us please a pantry bare of creative thought and application.
For this is a work of much merit.
I find no joy today in the dated tortuous, tortuous passages of ideas and prose from say Hemmingway or Orwell. But they became giants of the literary form, gifted masters of their craft.
But they were of their time. And time passes.
We look then to Mr Good and his book. For notwithstanding my first impression, this is a book and one with a story line -- however tortuous and complex - with characters and contradictions.
The premise is a schoolteacher has lost his wife in a bombing on the London Underground.
He is filled with grief but directs his anger not to the terrorists , the men who makes the munitions and set the bombs, but the politician whose actions have created the mindset of the bombers.
He is the man who is the target of the writer's hate, the man he must KILL.
He sets out his thoughts in the form of diary pages which he allows us to share in his interlocution with his therapist.
At times his angry words are like birdsong from Dante's pit.
But beyond this vitriol he poses some tantalising moralistic issues.
Who is most to blame, the man who
makes the war or the man who makes the soldier?
Who is to blame when someone is blinded by a champagne cork: the one who freed the cork? Or the cork maker?
What if the cork rebounds a thousand times?
He argues that history is not about the past--- it is about how the past is told to us.
It is important for one reason- it shows us how people lie.
He is always showing action and reaction -- causatives and alternatives..... posing these contradications and reflexes.
What is charity without sacrifice?
Mr Good's characterisation is a deft drawing of sorrowful images of a soldier broken in body and spirit or the fellow husband of a bombing victim whose wife and homelessness turn out a tasteless lie.
And then, the faults;
He has his head teacher saying a pupil
" was sat in front". This is ghastly dialect and is ungrammatic.
British English teachers should not use dialect forms of English such as "stay sat" in a British English classroom.
If the teachers know better they should show their pupils the way, and if they don't know better they shouldn't be teachers.
I was also left wondering how he knew his target's travel arrangements for that fateful event on the railine; or who drew the pints of blood which he stored away?
This is Anthony Good's first book - and for all its quirks is indeed a good book
Purists (do they exist in the eclectic world of literary criticism?) may baulk at the format, the technique and devices used by the author --redacted passages lasting as long as five pages of blacked out patches of type, the lack of page numbers and "chapters" that are two to three long.
But spare us please a pantry bare of creative thought and application.
For this is a work of much merit.
I find no joy today in the dated tortuous, tortuous passages of ideas and prose from say Hemmingway or Orwell. But they became giants of the literary form, gifted masters of their craft.
But they were of their time. And time passes.
We look then to Mr Good and his book. For notwithstanding my first impression, this is a book and one with a story line -- however tortuous and complex - with characters and contradictions.
The premise is a schoolteacher has lost his wife in a bombing on the London Underground.
He is filled with grief but directs his anger not to the terrorists , the men who makes the munitions and set the bombs, but the politician whose actions have created the mindset of the bombers.
He is the man who is the target of the writer's hate, the man he must KILL.
He sets out his thoughts in the form of diary pages which he allows us to share in his interlocution with his therapist.
At times his angry words are like birdsong from Dante's pit.
But beyond this vitriol he poses some tantalising moralistic issues.
Who is most to blame, the man who
makes the war or the man who makes the soldier?
Who is to blame when someone is blinded by a champagne cork: the one who freed the cork? Or the cork maker?
What if the cork rebounds a thousand times?
He argues that history is not about the past--- it is about how the past is told to us.
It is important for one reason- it shows us how people lie.
He is always showing action and reaction -- causatives and alternatives..... posing these contradications and reflexes.
What is charity without sacrifice?
Mr Good's characterisation is a deft drawing of sorrowful images of a soldier broken in body and spirit or the fellow husband of a bombing victim whose wife and homelessness turn out a tasteless lie.
And then, the faults;
He has his head teacher saying a pupil
" was sat in front". This is ghastly dialect and is ungrammatic.
British English teachers should not use dialect forms of English such as "stay sat" in a British English classroom.
If the teachers know better they should show their pupils the way, and if they don't know better they shouldn't be teachers.
I was also left wondering how he knew his target's travel arrangements for that fateful event on the railine; or who drew the pints of blood which he stored away?
This is Anthony Good's first book - and for all its quirks is indeed a good book