Book Festival

BOOK FESTIVAL

URBAN LANDSCAPE IN FICTION. BOOK FESTIVAL Will Self and Andrew O'Hagen

HHH Will Self is a London journalist, writer and reformed drug addict who was thrown off Tony Blair's 1997 election plane allegedly for relapsing in the toilet. He's also a member of the Groucho Club school of metropolitan iconoclasts, and writes heavily ironic pieces such as: Design Faults In The Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual, and Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys.

Andrew O'Hagen is a Scottish journalist and writer who grew up in Irvine new town and whose most recent novel is an account of the failures of post war town planning.

So you might have thought these two wouldn't have a great deal to say to each other. Not so. Self's dad, it emerges, was a town planner. Self claims that his lurid, dystopic writing about the "city-scape" is a reaction to his father's preoccupation with urban social engineering.

O'Hagen isn't so well-versed in post-modern irony. He says uncool things such as: "Buildings speak to me." He is indebted to the "lyri- cism of the rent strikes in Glasgow" and the "civic optimism" of old socialists such as the late Harry McShane. He still believes in urban renewal, and talks nostalgically about the day his family moved into their Irvine new town house to find red ribbons on the taps. This is not the kind of thing that will get you lionised in the Groucho.

But Self didn't scoff. Indeed, he seemed to be struggling to clean up his act and to say something non-ironic for a change. His writings are to be understood, he says, as an expression of the "city as alienation", as "distorted cities of the mind''. It's difficult to tell when Self is being serious since everything he says is in quote marks. The distortion in his books is usually chemically induced.

There's something inherently self-regarding about these literary stand-ups. But with his sincere and dignified defence of civic virtues and social progress, O'Hagen made Self's metropolitan cynicism seem shallow and pretentious.

Maybe he could have done with a Glasgow kiss.

Iain Macwhirter Fringe theatre

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS - FOUR SHORT PLAYS Gilded Balloon

HHHH No-one has captured the tawdry underbelly of the American dream quite like Tennessee Williams. Which is why it's such a pleasure to see this quartet of rarely performed early short works.

All the light and shade of his world of beautiful losers is on show, with The Dark Room little more than a sketch in which a woman is questioned by a visiting bureaucrat about the reason her daughter locks herself away in her room. A Perfect Analysis Given By A Parrott is a perfectly observed tete-a-tete, as a pair of bitchy old battleaxes are let off the leash to paint the town red.

The Lady Of Larkspur Lotion finds a pair of down-and-out fantasists make-believing former and future glories to get them through the day without recourse to hitting the bottle. They become kindred spirits and co-dependents, living a glorious lie to the end of the road.

Most heartbreaking of all is Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen, which finds a man and a woman moved to a place beyond intimacy and on the edge of desperation. He's been "passed around the city like a dirty postcard", while she longs to be in a place where no-one knows her name and where she can be anyone she wants, and where her slight form can evaporate into the ether un-noticed.

After a long silence the words pour out, her emotions uncorked, yet somehow through the pain the pair find each other again. Just as well, because it's all they've got. This is truly a mini-masterpiece guaranteed to leave a lump in the throat, with Sadie Shimmin and Ron Emslie fragile, broken and battered as the couple, all damaged goods and broken hearts.

Nathan Osgood's production for the tiny East Dulwich Tavern is suitably scrappy affair, with a smoky live saxophone provoking images of bickering neon. Janet Prince and Janice Laurie play assorted grand dames and faded southern belles in a gorgeous selection box of bittersweet treats. More please.

Neil Cooper

FLUX FESTIVAL THE FALL/ELASTICA Queen's Hall August 22

HH Let's get the excitement out of the way first, then. Excitement, that is, if your idea of rock 'n' roll nirvana is watching a bunch of noisy pseudo-punk rip-off merchants bouncing up and down on the spot. Tonight's support comes from Elastica, playing their first gig in the best part of half a decade.

The new Elastica line-up features original bassist Annie Holland, a supremely irritating girl called Mew (whose role, it appears, is to play one-finger keyboard and screech a bit), and an anonymous indie bloke on keyboards. Apart from that it's business as usual.

A trawl through some old songs and some new ones that sound exactly the same, an ill-advised cover of Trio's mid-80s Europop doodle Da Da Da, and a blast through Wire's 12XU at the end. The only moment of any note is a new number called A Love Like Ours, which prowls sullenly around a two-chord Cramps riff and sticks in your head for days.

Fall frontman Mark E Smith, as is his wont, turns up at the venue late. There was a time when such wilful disregard for his audience was expected and acceptable, but with the band's recent output having proved staggeringly below-par, such aloofness begins to grate a little. Still, he actually seems quite sober for once, howling his way through a heap of faceless new numbers while his hired-hand backing band chugs away behind him.

At one point an excitable fan leaps on stage and is wrestled away by security. Smith stands watching with an air of bemused derision, and just for a moment there's a glimpse of that devastating gittishness we used to know and love.

But it doesn't last. Although there's a certain spark, the truth is that Mark E Smith and the Fall are past it. They encore with a passable Big New Prinz but by this point, any sense of excitement stems entirely from a desperate audience trying to will the band into actually mattering again.

One hell of a fall but in the wrong sense entirely.

Simon Stuart

Copyright 1999
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