The book opens in Shoreditch, an area in East London, the first person narrator lamenting the socioeconomic shift to upscale and voicing a desire/fantasy of a return to yesteryear.

“I wanted to bring back the image of the dell, the doxie, the bawdy basket to an area that gentrification was trying to sweep clean. It was risky to work the traditional corners of Hanbury and Commercial Streets.”

Your narrator is not just a hooker but also an artist as well as university educated, and spends the next 75 pages or so, debating Communism, economics, prostitution, lit theory, and whether or not the writer Henry James was, in fact, Jack-the Ripper, all the while citing various obscure literary pieces. Hint: Although in this book, James initially comes off as the prime Ripper suspect, a cunning twist of time travel and hallucinogen suddenly propels the beat writer William Burroughs to the top of the list and the theory that he just might be our man. William Burroughs, who knew?

What follows is more or less a blur of frenetic sexual activity, intoxication and more literary debate. Finally giving in to the piss-take of it all (prior to this, I’d traipsed along innocently enough), I stopped trying to follow the activity in any sort of linear sense but Home still left me in the dust.

After the Ripper ruminations, it was decided that the narrator and colleagues would embark on a snuff film and selected a “john” named Alan Abel as candidate. The simple premise of this film was that Abel would simply be “fucked to death.” There followed page after page of Abel being mounted by a series of various and sundry women, all delightfully described in short detail.

Here is where I had a problem, however, and found myself taking issue with Home’s literary devices – specifically he recycles three or four of the descriptions word for word, just changing the woman’s name. This occurs on pages 106 / 124 (Mary Thatcher / Mary White), 110 / 124 (Polly / Samantha), 113 / 125 (Sarah / Lilith), and three times on pages 104 / 111 / 126 (Angela / Koonika / Kait).

There may have been additional instances of this but even in my more obsessive moments, this is all I had the patience to track. The snuff film gangbang sequence went on far too long as it was, but to further just copy the descriptions word for word was too much, and I felt that Stewart Home should be severely scolded for this cheap copy/paste deal, although I suspect that he would appreciate it on some level. This had the unintended (or maybe intended?) effect of putting me in a foul mood and I struggled mightily to retain some sort of literary objectivity. Finally, this all leads to a kind of ghoul grand finale in an East London graveyard that, with some of the fantastical and Egyptian references, reads as if Aleister Crowley were to meet William Burroughs in an opium smoke-off.

I wanted to like this book and surely there were moments in it that were brilliant but nothing cohesive and alas, brilliant moments cannot stand on their own. Knowing something about Stewart Home’s public persona – visual artist, performance artist and general cultural urban guerrilla and wind-up merchant, I read the book in that context. Still, it was hard to shake the sense of Home’s taking the piss which is fine but it didn’t do much for even the most basic feeling of completion that a reader has when reaching the end and a sense of having wasted one's time.

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Marc Goldin currently lives in Chicago, with three cats, each one more long-haired than the last. Interests have ranged from medieval monasticism to discontinued stations on the London Underground – literary likes too diverse (some would say schizo) to list here although the last several years have been witness to an intimacy with Scottish and Irish literature. American Southern and Beat era lit also account for some of the ‘missing years’. Music tastes run the gamut from Cuban Danzon to Ska (all three waves but having a specific attachment to the second, two-tone period) to the Tuvan throat singers. Has written book reviews for a now defunct Irish literature site and has several short stories in various stages of development. Mad for black and white photography and aspires to someday have a complete collection of photos documenting every close in Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Works in the IT dept. of a French company in the current political climate. In football, supports Chelsea, Hibs, and for the sake of employment security, Marseille. To read more of Marc’s writing on the showcase section of this site, click here

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© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.