In the opening scene, the central protagonist, the Kid, visits a Florida library and asks to use the internet. This may not seem either a gripping or particularly challenging opening, but when you learn that his purpose is to use the internet to check that he really is listed on the sex offenders register, you quickly realise this is a novel whose drama is as much psychological as physical. The Kid spends most of the novel in a strange netherworld beneath a causeway bridge peopled by other child sex offenders, one of only two places in the county where he can manage to fulfil his parole terms of not residing within a 2,500 metre radius of a school; the other place is the swamp. Here, he eventually encounters The Professor, a prodigiously gifted academic who wants to research the link between sex offenders and homelessness. At first the Professor seems a potential saviour, someone to grant the Kid a semblance of humanity, but when the Professor’s shady past in underground networks resurfaces, the Kid is forced to become his ally, even as he questions the truth of everything the older man says.

As may be expected from a novel with a convicted sex offender and an ex-double agent as its protagonists, Banks is careful not to celebrate either of the two characters or excuse their actions. But what he does do is invite the reader into questioning the moral certainties that fuel tabloid headline writers. Both characters, it transpires, come from damaged backgrounds, forcing us to ask whether society is now shunning people it might once, with a basic level of state care, have saved. And there is also an interest in the way that the US justice system has evolved into a mix of St Paul and Kafka, with criminals convicted less for their acts than for intent, then punished with a task that is almost impossible to complete.

However, Banks’s main interest in this novel seems to be not nuances of the justice system, but the way technology is pushing mankind into the new era that critics term the post-human. The novel’s epigraph is from Ovid’s Metamporphoses – ‘Now I am ready to tell how bodies changed into different bodies’ – and this change is partly signalled by the electronic GPS tags that each of the offenders are required to wear. This technology not only virtually adheres to the skin, but also changes the spatial relation of the wearer to the wider world, plugging them into a wider network that channels their life into information banks. But the primary change comes from the internet and the easy availability of porn, and the mutability of identity once we start typing words on a screen. The Kid is a sex offender who has never as much held a girl’s hand, but has, from the age of eleven onwards, been exposed virtually to every sexual act imaginable. And as Banks slowly reveals the online chat that lead to the Kid’s arrest, we see how easy it is to conceal identity on the internet: free of skin, we can create ourselves anew with words, but this metamorphosis comes at the cost of being unable to know exactly who we’re speaking to. There is no attempt to excuse the Kid’s actions, but there is a clear sense of the spiral he gets trapped within, and we read with a queasy sense of the inevitability of his downfall.

If the novel has a weakness, I feel it comes in the last hundred pages, not with the denouement of the Professor’s tale, but the emergence of a new figure, the Writer, who appears as if by magic to help tie up virtually every loose end. And the revelation that the library assistant who helps the Kid in the first scene is actually the Professor’s wife is a coincidence so great that even Dickens might have been wary of it.

Nevertheless, Lost Memory of Skin remains a very rewarding book to read. Banks not only pushes the boundaries of what the modern novel will accept as its subject matter, but also, in this one novel, experiments with form more than most novelists will do in their whole career, with some chapters presented as transcript, occasional forays into legal and historical summaries, and a slipperiness of point of view that keeps the reader forever on their toes. Not all the experimentation is successful – I fail to see what italicising dialogue adds, when writers like McCarthy and Doctorow have already shown that dialogue can be handled perfectly well without any markers at all. But perhaps the most successful ‘experiment’ is actually a return to a style that predates the anodyne brevity that marks much contemporary American fiction. Banks here provides sentence after sentence that pulse with bewitching lyricism, unafraid to run on for more than a couple of lines and explore the limits and the strengths of language.

Russell cites Minnie Riperton as a major influence, but her great strength is belting out a good lyric rather than Riperton’s filigree trips up to top C.  This was particularly true on the tracks ‘Turn and Run’ and ‘Living the Life of a Dreamer’ from ‘Pot of Gold’. The band that played at Band on the Wall really cooked and Russell rode over the top of the music with great confidence and strength.  In this, she was ably assisted on backing vocals by Mike Skinner, who’s that rare thing, a really swinging violinist, entirely capable of trading licks with pianist, Alfredito Linares. At one point, percussionist Freddy Colorado led a conga around the already rammed dance floor.

Holland and Russell produce a distinctly retro-seventies R&B, the kind of R&B that’s profoundly slick, but runs a mile from the smooth edges of the nu-soul divas and their entourages.  But this was also a band who were capable of producing a delicate and nuanced version of the Stranglers’ Golden Brown, and obviously South American pieces on which Holland played accordion and Skinner the mandolin.

It’s one of those peculiarities of British popular music, that Alice Russell is so talented yet so unknown.  Not unknown to this audience who greeted her with cries of ‘We love you Alice’.  Let’s hope this new album, Look Around the Corner, on Tru Thoughts, will create a real breakthrough for her. Here, Russell was singing to the converted;  and the whole show drove them wild!

Ian Pople

How to hold life in a language – it’s the poet’s task. This, Jones’s first short collection, is a good raid on the inarticulate, complete with buckets, boxes, bottles and sarcophagi within which to contain his finds. ‘It’s a matter of where you tread’ opens the first poem, which nicely contains read, the speaker going on to hold the ‘furious resonance’ of a bee in a bottle, inviting us to ‘hold the note and enter’. In the next, ‘Formicidae’, Jones turns to bottled ants, his vessel the sonnet:

We bottled them and turned them out to war,
the red and black on summer pavement flags.
We crouched to watch them kill and kept the score
of efficient dismemberings; thorax,
the tiny heads, the limbless in despair […]

They are transformed into ‘Paris’, ‘Achilles’, Myrmidons fighting ‘for the colour of their little nations’, before a brave-or-stupid final couplet defuses the situation with an uneasy fun:

And when we tired of our killing play
we smeared them on the stones and went away.

There’s a change of tack in the next, a great poem, ‘Preservations’. We find the speaker ‘on the day we burned the old dictionaries, | a batch of German-to-English ones.’ Immediately we find ourselves in potentially depthy territory, a ‘Bücherverbrennung in the morning.’ Jones forces nothing and allows the poem to speak for itself, with wonderful play, from the pun on sparkle in the German ‘sprachlos’, speechless, to the beautiful description of ‘the last pages’ as ‘a flicker of inklings.’ The hesitancy of ‘Their tongues of flames changed colour, | red becoming violet, yellow white, | as if uncertain of their own identity’ is compared to the ‘sure-fire sense | that verbs burned bluer than nouns, | that adjectives gave off most smoke’.

A loose thread carefully weaves the collection together. ‘Sleep-Talking’ echoes ‘Preservations’ in the first few lines:

She was talking in her sleep, not clearly,
hardly English, as if sleeping
she wandered through a charred dictionary
as large as a house. From afar I heard
a mutter from a womb: it was echoic and grave […]

Echoes, wombs, graves – again we are in a rich vein of poetry, in sleep ‘the words | shifting to new arrangements.’ In the following poem, ‘Arrangement’, the speaker gathers ‘inklings and omens like kindling’, shrugs off skin or shirt (we are not sure) to ‘arrange it carefully by like an echo.’ The book itself becomes ‘a sudden paper tomb’ in ‘Moth’:

Pressed in the pages of the book
a moth that must have landed here
has turned into this powder blur,
the one dimension of itself.

A disembodied Kleopatra views her mummification in ‘Kleopatra: Room 62’; in ‘Archaeopteryx’ we see ‘a silk-screen print on stone: | the first bird on the cross of its skeleton’, the rhyme delicate, the image exact.

Furious Resonance is a mixed bag full of gems and, following his success in the 2011 Bridport Prize, it’s been a good year for Jones. Originally from Bradford, now living in Cumbria, his reputation has been growing for some time. He manages variety without dilution, an array of form, language, theme – the rolling, unpunctuated style in poems like ‘Mirror of Dark’, a homage to the dark Cumbrian winter, sits comfortably alongside the sonnets:

dark we say and we are approaching Aglionby
which is two lights in the rain and we are dropping
down to dark Warwick Bridge and we see ourselves
in the dark in the reflection of the window
so dark we say and everyone is upbeat in the dark

belonging here and if you look at a globe
and see England and see where the arctic is and the pole
so we are up near the dark so you could walk
and it would be dark and we stand up in the aisle
in the dark mirrors of the windows with no outside

It is the familiar suddenly perceived, and the sharpness of that perception, found somehow in language, that characterises Furious Resonance. Jones’s eye, pressed against the glass, is a keen one.

John North is the winner of the Centre for New Writing’s Poetry Review Writing Competition, 2012. His chapbook, Northern Lad Meets the English Language, Fights, was published by The Freerange Poetry Project, in association with Carlisle Arts Festival, in 2007. John is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

The room is dominated by a 1986 self-portrait, a red and black silkscreen of Warhol in a fright wig. At first sight, the red head appears to hang in a black void, as if Warhol were insisting on the primacy of his own image, converting it into a Pop Art totem. On closer inspection, the black space is in fact slashed through by stray wisps of hair that stick up. The top of the painting ends where the hairs end, just as its bottom ends below the chin. The black void we first see is then revealed to be claustrophobic, a box that allows no movement beyond the limits of the self. Whether the painting is a metaphor of the limits of the aging body or of the crushing confines of fame, once we realise the limits of the frame, Warhol’s image becomes more haunted than narcissistic, the coolly starting eyes presenting a challenge to the viewer to consider their own part in a culture that constantly demands objects for its communal gaze to consume.

Similar themes of mortality and fame are touched on in several of the other works. There are, for example, two versions of Self-Portrait Strangulation, where a picture of Warhol with someone’s hands around his neck is reproduced over and over, but the constant repetition never solves the picture’s central mystery: is his twisted expression the result of an assassination attempt by a crazed admirer, or just Andy goofing off for the cameras? In another self-portrait, again in red and black, we see a three-quarter portrait of Warhol inhabiting the familiarly cool guise that was his trademark. But when we look closer at what at first appears just another moment of self-publicity, we see a skull creeping in from the surrounding blackness, apparently gnawing into his shoulder.

The skull motif reappears in what seems the boldest inclusion in an exhibition of self-portraits: Skulls, a 1986 silkscreen that treats a skull to the familiar Warhol treatment of the same image repeated over and over, distinguished only by changes of colours and different levels of deterioration. Whether the skull is supposed to represent Warhol or not, by giving it the same treatment as icons such as Monroe or Jackie Kennedy, he shows us what Eliot calls ‘the skull beneath the skin’, the mortality that no amount of plastic surgery or photo airbrushing can ever remove. It may not be a self-portrait of Warhol’s actual skull, but it is a self-portrait of his and everyone else’s future. And in the intimacy of a small gallery where paintings can be viewed close and without a press of tourists at one’s elbow, what this work also reveals is the subtle interplay in Warhol between the expected and the unexpected: the identical images that never quite give our eye what we think we’ll encounter, defeating our expectations with a thick smear of paint that disrupts the otherwise smooth surface, or with a marked deterioration of the copied image, or with the unnatural glow of lime green acrylic against the white of the skull.

Perhaps the most intimate works here though are the small self-portrait photographs in a cabinet at the centre of the room. Some of them are familiar from reproductions as silkscreen images, but others, you feel, are ones Warhol made less for public consumption than as reminders of his own mortality. This, it seems to me, is Warhol confronting his end. His face in these photos is drawn and deathly pale, the look towards the camera stripped both of affection and affectation. Even in the images where he’s donned a transvestite’s wig and smeared his face with make-up, the decay and self-knowledge are obvious. After all the years of fame, he’s reduced to a lonely, ruined diva whichever guise he adopts.

Showing in an adjacent room, a selection of prints from Eduardo Paolozzi’s Moonstrips Empire News gives a different perspective on Pop Art. Paolozzi’s Pop Art was always more political than that of his American counterparts, sceptical towards the huge embrace of American culture by Britain, and Moonstrips Empire News makes that scepticism explicit. He identifies in his introduction that London was most vulnerable to media bombardment because, unlike the US, Britain had no reality against which to compare the images favoured by American advertisers and filmmakers.

The end result, as selected here, is variable in quality, ranging from abstract patterns that look like they’ve slipped off psychedelic wallpaper to razor-sharp juxtapositions of Disney and missiles. However, it offers an interesting contrast to Warhol, and does provide some insight into the techno anxiety that the American mass media provoked. It’s no surprise to discover that Paolozzi was close friends with J. G. Ballard, as they were both equally prophetic of our own age’s submission to mass media and advertising, and shared a similar unease about the fusion of technology and everyday life.

In this Olympic year, when the Tate has chosen Damien Hirst to represent British Art, I wonder if Paolozzi wouldn’t have been a more interesting and challenging choice. He’s certainly long overdue a major retrospective, though I doubt he’ll get one soon: more likely, unfortunately, is that the intricate Paolozzi murals that decorate Tottenham Court Road tube will be covered over by advertising space, one more stage in the steady transformation of the world around us into a space whose only purpose is to sell. Were he still alive, I’m sure Paolozzi would have seen the irony. As Moonstrips Empire News makes clear, even in 1967, he saw it coming.

Graves Gallery open 10-3, Wed-Fri; 11-3, Sat. Warhol exhibition runs until 1st December. Admission free.

What the film does explore in particular detail are the ways in which males interact with males.  The police commissar Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) bullies and attacks the murder suspect Kenan (Firat Tanis) in a way that stereotypes both men.  That is, until he finds out that Kenan thinks he is the father of the victim’s ’son’.  And then it is Kenan’s honour that Naci finds respect for.  The Prosecutor, Nusret (Taner Birsel) regales the car with a story of a woman’s death immediately after the birth of her child.  Later on that story rebounds on Nusret.  The Doctor Cemal, Muhammet Uzuner, is haunted by his lost marriage.  For all these men purchase on the world is tenuous and fragile.

That fragility is perfectly illustrated than when they repair to the house of a village major and are served tea by his exquisitely beautiful daughter.  Her fragility and their awareness of the fleeting nature of that moment of grace (in every sense), reduces them to emotional silence. So the absence of women in these men’s lives is a fundamental factor in their nature.  This is amusingly emphasized early in the film with a mobile phone conversation between Commissar Naci and his wife. And elsewhere the film is almost absurdly funny, as in the moment when Prosecutor Nusret compares first the murder victim and then himself to Clark Gable.

This film has, obviously, been garlanded with prizes and wonderful reviews.  It is a very beautiful film, and Ceylan forensically examines notions Turkish manhood and masculinity, in ways which are genuinely engrossing. It is a powerful and absorbing film, but boy it is slow!!!

Ian Pople

The novel begins with Ian, the hapless narrator, punished by his boss (a man who ‘would love to play rugby with the heads of human beings’) for his recent sales figures. The bizarre punishment is being forced to imagine a tube is his baby. He must carry it with him at all times and nurture it. Whenever he fails to do so, his boss, as Argus-eyed as Orwell’s Big Brother, sends him a text, even when he’s in the shower.

From this weird beginning, Ian’s life spirals downward into a nightmare existence whose humour gets blacker and blacker. His job title changes to Tiny Shit Head. He’s forced to work in a different office, manacled to the desk and given the task of counting numbers on a screen. He gets pulled into a sales scam for ‘AquaVeg’, a miracle food supplement that tastes of fish. He goes without food to try and save enough money for a trip to the French Alps, but, overcome by desire for the travel agent, lets her book him one to the Italian Alps instead.

Through all of this, he still has to nurse the tube, which he christens Mildred. But what Ian doesn’t know is that Mildred is a conscious object, with a scornfully superior attitude to human beings. Her narrative starts to intrude on Ian’s as she plans her escape to a life where she can fulfil her function of carrying things from one place to another (But she may not know as much as she thinks she does – with a diameter of only 2.5 inches, any plumber would tell her that any dreams of transporting excrement are likely to end up blocked).

The plot and the black comedy are justification enough alone to read it, but it has to be noted that Adams also manages to introduce some pithy observations about the modern world, where, ‘all human interaction is sales’. For, like all the best black comedy, this bleak book does have a certain human tenderness at its heart, as evinced by the (slightly hurried) ending. It challenges us to consider what our lives have become amidst all this technology and idolatry of business. For example, the scene when Ian discovers his boss suspended by wires in front of numerous TV screens has a nightmarish reality that should make every reader in a multi-TV, multi-computer household shudder. There is also some brilliant riffing on business speak, but this will unfortunately go over the heads of anyone who’s ever done an MBA or believes people really do get excited by blue-sky thinking, etc.

If I have one gripe about the book, it’s the slightly repetitive style, which consists mainly of short single-clause sentences that often loop around the same idea to the point of exhaustion: ‘This neighbourhood is not very welcoming. The people around me do not look very welcoming. I do not feel welcome.’ While this style had numerous adepts, and may well be a reflection of Ian’s monotonous existence, I can’t help feeling it soon feels samey, and ignores some of the possibilities of the English sentence. You can pare down and pare down, but after a while the sentences become a deadbeat succession that sacrifices some of the richness of simultaneity. Perhaps Adams realises this too, for the book does have plenty of textual intrusions, ranging from text messages to domestic accounts, sales leaflets to computer screens, but there’s a real sense of relief towards the end of the novel when the comma is allowed in from its exile.

Overall though, this is a highly enjoyable and assured debut. It is also testament to the powers of dedication and enthusiasm of independent publishers: Transmission Print is a one-man operation publishing one book a year, yet this dust-jacketed paperback is so lovingly produced that it puts most of the offerings of the big publishers to shame. The text is clear, the paper crisp, and the novel a joy to both hold and read – the perfect tonic next time you pull a sickie from the office.

Set mostly at the fictional Westish College, the novel centres on Henry Skrimshander, a preternaturally talented baseball shortstop whose surname is the first of the novel’s tiresome string of Melville puns. Spotted by the college’s baseball captain, Mike Schwartz, Henry wins a scholarship and proceeds to propel Westish’s baseball team to sporting greatness. But then, disaster strikes: he accidentally hurls the ball at his roommate, Owen, and ever after suffers the yips whenever he has to throw under pressure. Will the team make it to the national finals without him? Will he ever be able to throw a baseball again? Tied in with this semblance of a plot line is the return of the college president’s wayward daughter, Pella, who promptly falls for Schwartz, and a turgid and cringeworthy affair between Owen and the college president, Affenlight, who never knew he was gay until he saw this Adonis. Still awake?

Perhaps in more assured hands something could have been rescued from this shipwreck of lazy plotting, but Harbach fails to do so. I think part of this failure stems from an overwhelming reluctance to give any of his characters a flaw. Put simply, whenever anything bad happens to a character, it isn’t their fault. Henry’s great torment is occasioned by bad luck. Affenlight isn’t a college president abusing his duty of care in a very creepy manner, he’s just struck down by Eros. Schwartz and Pella fall out with each other, but it’s all a misunderstanding. Et cetera. This curse of niceness/blandness afflicts everyone in the college, right down to the grumpy canteen chef, who secretly wants to train people to cook amazing food.

However, despite their varied stories and crises, all this cast of modern-day saints achieve is a steady leeching of all tension from the novel: a critical fault in any novel, but especially one so long. The reader is left in no doubt that everything will end in a happy fashion, and so it proves. Even when Affenlight’s affair is discovered, he is granted a graceful exit, then honoured in one of the book’s most ludicrous scenes.

And throughout all 512 pages of this, there are the constant references to Melville, in everything from Henry’s surname to Affenlight’s email password. It’s hard to see what these serve. Presumably, they’re intended as a knowing nod to the tradition of the American novel. Yet the impression they leave is of an author piggybacking on Melville in an attempt to give this needlessly baggy book intellectual depth. Like virtually everything else in and about this book, they’re a failure.

It’s difficult, unfortunately, to sit through the first twenty minutes of Ralph Fiennes’ modern rendering of Coriolanus without distraction. And these distractions do rather shake the whole project. The first distraction is that the shaven headed Fiennes’ looks uncomfortably like his recent portrayal of Voldemort in the Harry Potter films; a look that tends to be reinforced when Coriolanus loses his rag, which he does quite often! The second distraction is that the early battle scenes bear more than a passing resemblance to scenes out of the urban recreations in the video game, Call of Duty. This resemblance is particularly true in a scene in which Fiennes’ Caius Martius goes through a burnt-out house, single-handedly taking out the enemy; a shoot-em-up in blank verse. I kept expecting Fiennes to slump in front of the camera and the second clock to tick round while he ‘respawned’, or resuscitated! Perhaps Fiennes also has a teenage son, or perhaps, more cynically, Fiennes hopes the DVD will appeal to sixth-forms!

But as distancing as those distractions are, the film as a whole does reach into the heart of Shakespeare’s Roman play. If Coriolanus isn’t one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem’ plays, there is a problem in that the central character can seem only self-obsessed and totally at the mercy of his warped drive-to-war. Fiennes’ doesn’t avoid that problem but one effect of his updating of the play to a contemporary Balkans is to show how such warping can be part of political culture. So, such distortion of the personality is some how more ‘understandable’. The other problem with Coriolanus is his utter loathing for the ‘prols’! On stage, that loathing is slightly dispersed amidst the whole texture of character. Here such loathing is rather sprung on us as the political machinations of the Roman Senate both pluck Caius Martius out as Consul and rename him ‘Coriolanus’, for his victory over the Corioles.

At the same time, Fiennes and his screen-writer, John Logan, have pared back to a real essence. And this essence is brought alive by wonderful acting, in particular Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ mother, Volumnia, who is both the mother and mother-in-law from hell, but moves through the film into a central, political role. Brian Cox is wonderful as the increasingly rejected mentor Menenius, and Jessica Chastain, as Coriolanus’ wife, Virgilia also shows that she is well able to deal with verse speaking. Gerard Butler is a little side-lined as Coriolanus’ initial arch-enemy, Tullus Aufidius, until a slightly clunky homo-eroticism follows Coriolanus’ desertion of Rome for the enemy.

In general, Fiennes’ up-dating works beautifully; the filming in the Bosnian parliament building, a check-point on some out-of-the-way motorway deep in Eastern Europe, Fiennes’ journey into the ‘world elsewhere’ that is his exile is lovingly filmed. The only real oddity is John Snow’s appearance in a Roman Channel Four News!