Miles Donald

Loony Tunes

Moon Palace

By

Faber & Faber 286pp £12.95 order from our bookshop

This book should carry a Moon Warning. It opens in the summer of the astronauts’ moon landing. This is the first of a host of moon references. A telephone call to a police station is answered by a Sergeant Neil Armstrong. A character called Uncle Victor plays the clarinet in bands called the Moonlight Moods and the Moon Men. The hero/narrator (of whom more shortly) rents a New York apartment from which he can see the neon sign of the Moon Palace restaurant. He picks up a hooker who calls him a lunatic; he talks of his ‘doom’ in terms of a total eclipse; he goes on about ‘radiant Diana…image of all that is dark within us.’

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