It's a Sunday afternoon here at The Foal and Pie-Chart (a spin off of the long out of fashion Horse and Flipchart), in Edge Street, Manchester. The weather outside is breezy and sunny. Nowadays people say 'brezzy' which kind of means breezy and shiny with a bite, I don't know. I'm not with the times. I have my Tab with me. I've been debating whether or not I should my face rendered. It's all the rage apparently. I've been reading what people are saying about it on my Tab. It's less evasive, more fashionable and cheaper than having it mutilated in the theatre and it retains the natural skull structure, so they say. I'm drinking petrol blue, Marmite- infused tea. On the sound system there's a 2010 revival. Crystal Castles feat. Robert Smith's I'm Not In Love is playing. Maybe later I'll go to the legendary nightclub, Rocky III, try and catch something, hopefully my youth. The year is 2017. In many ways 2017 feels more like a spit and polished 1984 or perhaps 1977 in her best underwear.
For various reasons I've been putting off what maybe I should have done a while ago, six years ago to be precise. I got the idea from Source Code. Kind of. With blogspot under 'Post Options' you can schedule a date and time. Well now, at the time of writing, in 2017, you can backdate posts. So this post is coming from the future. I want to believe that this post has gone back six years or so. As with everything else in 'His Light Materials' this is another review but not any ordinary review, as I have an indirect vested interest in its outcome. Had I originally supported the work, maybe I could have marginally had some impact on the book's success, instead of hooing and haaing around town like the hen in the fairytale who doesn't know what he's talking about (2011 Night Shift reference). Right, a quick sip of tea. Good. This is what I'm reviewing. Ooh, 'Spaceman' (Bimbo Jones remix) by The Killers has just come on. The revival has taken another year off.
I'm close to this work. Close enough, bordering on the biased. You see this book is about my small rise and my massive downfall. I was once a bright young thing. Doors were opened, often revolving doors, people smiled at me, they nodded and said things you later realised meant nothing but was basic, youthful, eager to please bullshit. I'm not the writer. Neither am I a figment of the writer's imagination. I can assure you that I am as real as anyone else in the social network. I exist inside of time but outside your reality. I observe and partake, eat crisps and enjoy bacon sandwiches. Events in this book, as described by Winstanley, are also based on real events of my life. Mother did have all her teeth out in 1991, when I was a teenager. I was a gloriously successful playwright for a time in the late 1990s, rather than the glorious fuck up I am today. And my descent into the abyss, to the extent that I still don't know if my dark journey was induced or it happened is every bit as real as is my copy of 'The Back Book' gathering dust at home. So you can understand my reluctance.
Winstanley opens the novella with a weird scene in a bar. You can be forgiven for five minutes for the misunderstanding that you have somehow taken a wrong turn by the science fiction and fantasy section in Waterstones and staggered out into the pavement, stumbled about for a while before wandering into the drama workshop of a little theatre, rehearsing any number of Jonathan Harvey plays. (But hold your horses. This scene happened. I did wear a weird costume in a dodgy bar when I was introduced to Fritz Pinterfool.)
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| 'Gathering dust at home.' |
With Replika as soon as you think you have it sussed, when you suspect that you've found the level , Winstanley ushers you quickly away into another part of the world which houses intense theatre directors, nervous breakdown-gossip columnists, suicidal taxi drivers, vampire gangsters and Mexican Manchester City fans. It's hedonistic in places, experimental and distressing in others but more often than not it has purposely encouraged bouts of red-faced unrestrained laughter most of the time. It gets better too. It seems to begin as a diatribe about pre-twenty-first century culture, amid a thin plot about the slow break up of a successful partnership, but quickly morphs into something else. Winstanley takes us deep into the subconscious or maybe its the future. We never really know. As far as I was aware at the time, my own experience really did feel as if I was in that no man's land between waking up and having my head thumped by five volumes of the Yellow Pages sculpted into a giant fist.
I really did witness a Broadband controlled taxi driver who threatened to kill us both. I still recall spending seventeen years in a coma, emerging to speak Turkish...backwards. My partner really told me he was made out of balsa wood, which was quite a surprise. It's all there in Replika. And there's more. It doesn't have an attitude of 'anything goes' as promised by the Children's ITV theme to Funhouse but it does contain fantasy, entertainment, a little bit of titillation, futurism, dramarama, very, very odd and bizarre characters including Jesus F. Shankley, Granada Eno and HarviNix. Only the other day while at The Cabbage and Volvo one of the blokes who used to be in Delphic was asking if it was the same Jesus F. Shankley who used to live in the city, own a nightclub and had a record label. Er...yesss! Who else?
Winstanley records, romanticises, embelishes, mythologises it all. Jaws from James Bond even turns up at one point. Benny and Bjorn probably did murder Westlife in the name of reality television - but it's all good clean fun. If I were to nitpick a little wittle bit, I'd say that there wasn't enough oral sex in the book. Overall it's a book about us. How we all try and fit in, how we drop out, societies, cliques, abuse of technology, substances, people. It's about choices and dubious alternatives. It's funny and bitter. I want you to buy it because it will the best book you will buy and read for a long time.
Or you can look to the right of this page under 'Shop For Replika'.
Jason has created a Replika soundtrack of music inspired by the book. Features music by The Magnetic Fields, Sebastien Tellier, Roxy Music, Underworld and others.
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