In total, and I expect deliberately, Clear rather resembles Blaine's stunt. It's impressively wilful and singular but annoyingly enigmatic and, in all probability, ultimately rather pointless.. Adair's puny storyline is uninteresting in itself, and the better and largest portion of the book is given over to insightful journalistic musings on what Blaine and his stunt might mean, and what the mostly hostile reaction of the British public says about us Two years on though, it feels a little irrelevant. One peculiar girl among the crowds, with her outlandish footwear and carrier-bag full of Tupperware, fascinates him, and they consummate their antagonistic and abortive relationship on HMS Belfast.
And there's also a subplot - or whatever the equivalent in a virtually plotless novel might be called - about the rise of UK garage star Dizzee Rascal.Barker deftly performs the sleight of hand necessary to maintain the illusion of a stream of consciousness - her self-conscious prose full of carefully positioned gaps, italics, and parentheses that convincingly give it the feel of disordered and inane ramblings. It's loquacious narrator, 28-year-old Adair Graham MacKenny, works in an undemanding clerical capacity in the nearby London Assembly building. He spends his lunch hours amid the rabble of onlookers, trying to pick up girls, and his evenings out of his depth in pseudo-intellectual discussions about Blaine with his ?-cool housemate. It's novelistic - an impressionistic series of scenes rather than a chronological history - and his prose is snappy and vernacular, like a crime writer (James Ellroy or Walter Mosley, say) mythologising the fascinatingly flawed, tough-talking urban outlaws and immigrants who shaped modern America.Leonard had the attitude, and some of the morals and business practices, of a gangster and he undoubtedly exploited his artists. But Cohen is also clear that he loved them and their music, and that he shared with them a deep connection forged of their formative experiences as America's dispossessed and hungry.Clear by Nicola Barker (HARPERPERENNIAL £7.99) Clear is set during the 44 days in 2003 that the American illusionist David Blaine spent, apparently without food, in a clear Perspex box suspended alongside the Thames.
Anything they learn about themselves they suppress, anxious to stay the way they always were. Not even life in Moscow at the height of Stalin's purges can rid Art of his Communist ideals; a loveless marriage can't make Eva take a chance on a different man. The novel opens in 1941 with the youngest of the three, Brendan, being transported to a Soviet Gulag. While he nears his fate, sister Eva is back in Ireland with her two children and without her estranged husband, and brother Art is enduring internment in an Irish camp. Having set up this curious outcome, Bolger has no choice but to show us how his characters got here, and so we dip back into life in the Big House, symbol of the Irish Ascendancy, in 1915.The "Big House" as metaphor has been done to death in Irish literature, and mercifully Bolger pretty much leaves it alone, beyond offering up its dual purpose as sanctuary for the family in general, as well as noose-around-the-neck of Art in particular, who stands to inherit it. In 1949 he opened the Macomba Lounge nightclub, which quickly became the hottest late-night joint in town, where knife fights and drug deals went down to the jumpy blues and jazz sounds provided by the house band.
