Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 September 2008 10:13:06
The grown up indy kid wanders into the local library and picks up The Life and Soul of the Party by Mike Gayle aswell as The Eight Legged Atomic Dustbin Will Eat Itself by Martin Roach.
Sitting in her new flat she starts to read, after lining up a nostalgia fest on the CD player. Whilst digesting the easy reading she realises her life is beginning to read like she is a Gayle minor character. Perhaps that's why she likes his books so much, besides getting the cultural references she "knows" the people in the book.
Life and Soul is not as good as some of Gayles previous books, reading too much like a screenplay rather than a novel of any depth. However, it has it's moments and still gives a decent read with its suburban realism of 30 somethings moving beyond living it large to living it complicated.
Many of the characters in Gayles book would have, as early 90's students, jumped around to the sounds of PWEI , The Wondersuff and Neds Atomic Dustbin , in their long sleeved t-shirts. So it is that Roach's book would have evoked some of the same type of memories for them as they did for me.
From what I can work out this book about The Black Country's finest is updated at regular intervals as fashion requires. It's the sort of book you read not so much to enjoy the content as much as to stimulate your senses and transport yourself back to a time gone by when fringes were floppy and you went to sweaty gigs where you danced until you ached.