Richard Smyth
Sussex Apocalypse
The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World
By Gareth E Rees
Influx Press 364pp £9.99
This novel, if we can call it that, plots a course towards apocalypse with an admirable lack of overexcitement. It’s a novel in which things fall apart, in which the centre cannot hold, but in which there is always time for a detour into local history. It’s a hallucinatory piece of work – Gareth Rees, narrating, sees Dungeness ablaze and tells of an eel with a head the size of an armchair in Dover harbour – but it’s seldom lurid. It’s essentially about breakdown (his, ours), but it’s a controlled fall, a strangely methodical collapse.
Hastings, here, is the setting for the end of the world. Rees and his young family occupy a Victorian fixer-upper near the sea; Rees, soon bored by the hard work of renovation, finds himself possessed by the town and its past. The reader is drawn into a peculiarly East
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
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner