RETROS SALLY MORRIS
THEY by Kay Dick (Faber £8.99, 128 pp)
LOST for 40 years, this dystopian novel is written in deceptively simple prose but the short, sharp sentences build, layer upon layer, a terrifying and menacing atmosphere in a world where they, the mysterious, ever-present philistine forces, wage war on art, writing, single people and even upon nature.
In a series of interlinked but independent chapters, an unnamed narrator and his/her dog visit or are visited by friends or colleagues who resist control, but the penalties are harsh.
Artists are blinded, musicians made deaf, resistors stripped of their memories and identities. surveillance is everywhere as the crushed masses sit watching TV. It’s a chilling cry against censorship and conformity and feels especially relevant in our cancel-culture times.
THE BLOATER by Rosemary Tonks (Vintage £8.99, 176 pp)
BACK in print after 50 years, this comic novel explodes on to the page like a shaken bottle of champagne.
set in 1960s London, it follows Min, married to the elusive and unsatisfactory George, as she is simultaneously disgusted by and sexually attracted to an overweight, renowned opera singer and occasional lodger — the Bloater of the title.
Brittle, shallow and witty, Min discusses sex with earthy colleague Jenny, flirts with devoted friend Billy and confides in older man claudi while earning her living at an electronic sound studio.
It’s a tiny, polished gem of a book in which the superficiality of tonks’ characters masks their visceral fear of acknowledging any real feelings, so much so that there’s a terrible poignancy when Min believes she has found her ‘soul mate’.
RITES OF PASSAGE by William Golding (Faber £8.99, 320pp)
A SHIP’S passage from Britain to Australia in the 1880s is the perfect backdrop for Golding’s dissection of class and morality.
the claustrophobic voyage is recorded by pompous, privileged Edmund talbot, en route to a colonial position, in a journal intended for his influential godfather. Lacking self-awareness, he comments on both crew and passengers and his observations on obsequious and naïve young parson James colley are particularly cruel, especially as colley has attracted the rage of clergyhating captain Anderson, who humiliates him and bans him from areas of the ship.
But when something horrendous happens to colley, the narrative switches to a letter the clergyman was writing to his sister, which turns everyone’s perceptions upside down — and forces repentant talbot to examine his own role. A worthy Booker prize winner in 1980.