james-gilberd

Hi Sean. Thanks for all that, and glad you enjoyed it. The chapter titles were retrofitted, so I had fun going through old records and trying to fit titles to the chapters in a relevant way. You seem to have to have a literary agent in order to get published these days. I hope to begin another novel soon with benefit from the experience of writing this one, and maybe it will be good enough to pub

Seanfs

I really enjoyed and it was a really good read . I thought the end with the tour and the match was too real , exceptionally well written . I really enjoyed the character observations and there were people i distinctly recognised there . I was at that party after the Moleswoth st march ( I realise its fictionalised here ) In reall life the girl with the belleding head's name was Karen. I rememb

james-gilberd

Hi Alistair. Thrilled that someone likes it! Thanks for your great feedback and helpful, insightful comments. This is the reason I put the novel up on the net. I agree with you, and in the process of getting down from 180,000 words (!) to 60,000, my Maori character (a kind of mentor to Steve) and the development of The Coopers (he went and flatted with them and a supernatural thread did indeed emerge) were lost. I left the Coopers in because I want to use them in the next novel :-). Interested to hear more comments and criticisms from readers. I have a pretty robust ego so be frank.

AlistairC

Another thing that I thought was a turn-off : the Coopers theme. I think it either needs to be developed or scrapped. I appreciate their usefulness as a plot device at two crucial turns, a deux ex machina thing, but I don't find that it resonates with anything else in the book, so it becomes a plausibility problem. Unless you want an explicit supernatural theme, which would need a lot more development and would probably derail the whole thing. (I'm a fine one to talk. I'm struggling with a sort of vampire-spoof novel which ends up taking itself too seriously!) So : now I feel obliged to enumerate some of the thingsI like about the book! The two-voice first-person narrative. It bothered me a bit at first, but in the end it works well (for me), it's a very economical way of providing a bit of distance from the narrator and underlining his subjectivity, and of course provides plenty of poignant irony with the alternate boy/girl views of the world. In general : the relationships: friendships, love, parents... bluntly and sparingly described, almost naively, and absolutely unpatronising, no hindsight.Excellent. The question of "race": the good are viscerally anti-racist, but the only actual contact with "non-whites"is getting beaten up by Rastas... it's a period piece, but note-perfect. Likewise Eric's Jewishness.

AlistairC

Hey I get to make the first comment! I loved the book, James! I spent Saturday night and Sunday morning reading it. Captures the period perfectly. Packs a fair wallop. I'm going to have a go at a bit of naive literary criticism. In the spirit of internet publishing, I feel that I owe you some feedback, and I hope you'll take it in the constructive spirit I intend. All the more so as an aspiring writer myself. I have so many reasons for liking it (having been around at the time, flirted with punk, involved in the demos etc) that I feel obliged to question its universality. On the whole I think it passes the test, with a couple of reservations. The chapter headings : I loved them. A real plus. But an in-joke, meaningless for anyone who doesn't know the music of the period. I'm sure you already know this, but I'm afraid they are self-indulgent, and probably a turn-off for most readers. (continues...)