Kevin Power
Jungle Fever
It’s hard to review a novel by Ned Beauman without calling him a show-off. But the thing about being a show-off is that you can’t be one unless you’re exceptionally good at whatever it is you’re showing off. ‘Show-off’ is really a term of covetous approbation – the compliment that envy pays to achievement. It would be easy to haul Beauman before the bench on charges of what Clive James used to call stunt writing: look at all these elaborate similes, Your Honour! Look at this preposterously convoluted plot! Better, perhaps, to say, with admiration: Beauman is very, very good at what he does.
But what is it, exactly, that he does? By page fifty of Beauman’s fourth novel, Madness Is Better than Defeat, the following events have occurred: a wrestler has been anally violated by an octopus; a renowned Cambridge anthropologist, wearing only ‘a kilt of bark and a necklace of flowers’, has
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Heaven for him was being caressed by duchesses in gilded salons and entertaining royalty in his palatial mansion ... where he showed off his gemmed gewgaws and laced the cocktails with Benzedrine.'
Piers Brendon on the diaries of Chips Channon (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-played-sardines-with-the-aga-khan
'Like so many of Ishiguro’s human narrators ... Klara contains within herself divisions and contradictions, pockets of knowledge that she isn’t able to synthesise fully.'
@infomodernist reviews 'Klara and the Sun'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-virtual-friend
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review