neiljung78's reviews
293 reviews

At times the prose gives a hint of friscalating dusklight but this is a good book, if hard to like at times. Hard to like in the sense that it needs you to run up against a kind of austere quality to the prose, even a dullness to take you back to where it wants to end up.

Favourite poems: Shadow and Looking Down

Some good bits but towards the end I was reading quick to get it over with. Suffered from that fantasy novel thing of 2nd book being too much a retread of stuff in the first. 

At times, I thought Auden did - with a kind of slightly abstract, European, anxious mythology- something similar to what Dylan did later with the characters of folk music.

Poems like pieces of sculpture.

It’s the Tempest! Most alive for me in the evocations of magic and the weird pageant stuff at the end. Must be gift for theatre directors those bits 

Macqueen writes for Private Eye and brings a kind of gay love for the trivia of peculiar English stuff (like Mark Gatiss maybe but for politics not horror films) to a detective story set in 1976, wherein a former rent boy ends up investigating the death of Norman Scott - so yeah this is also light alternative history, but more about a plot that lets us rattle around the period than sending us off into some other timeline. He interweaves actual facts (like Harold Wilson's dottiness and resignation and some others that would be spoilers) in a cute way and even manages to pull off a twist of sorts that is fair, surprising and chilling. After a nervous start, the writing is very readable and he gets that with this kinda thing, you need to like the protagonist and I did and there's one more of these books out already, with more to come and I'll read them. Mark Lawson tried to do something like this is a book called ah now what was it called – Enough is Enough – and this is WAY better. 

A novel that could only work AS a novel because it works by the cumulative effect of brief, clear chapters and makes times for irony and clarity but mostly avoids obviously evocative prose. So it works because of what is left out and that sometimes made me wonder ‘am I missing something? should I be looking deeper?’ but I will miss not having it with me.

My first Maigret and certainly good enough to make me want to read more. Very brief and with the feel of a short story in sone ways.