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CRITIQUE:

Stories From the City and the City (or A Tale of Two Cities)

The perspective and style of this novel call to mind authors like Martin Amis, JG Ballard, John Fowles, China Mieville, Michael Moorcock and Will Self, in whose number Nicholson deserves to be celebrated.

Cleverly structured, it's the structure of the novel that tells the story.

The novel focuses on two main cities (one of which obviously being London, the other not being St Kilda Beach (1.) in Melbourne) and three main characters (two of whom live in London).

Set in 1980's England, it contrasts provincial (artless and naive) Sheffield with cosmopolitan (urbane and corrupt) London.

Vengeance Ballads

Mick Wilton, a petty criminal and latter-day Don Quixote, believes his stripper girlfriend has been gang-banged by six "rich posh bastards", while performing at a private party in London.

He catches a train to London and then a taxi to the Dickens Hotel in Hackney, in pursuit of chivalrous revenge on Gabby's behalf.

Unfamiliar with London ("Basically London looks like a big slum with a few famous landmarks scattered through it...He did not find it a sexy city...He found it hard and scruffy and cold and affectionless, a place where terrible things happened or were made to happen"), all he has to go on is a list of the names of the six attendees.

He has to track them down via the phone book and his victims' address books (these are pre-Internet times) and punish them. Once he finds his quarry, he will rip it up and let it bleed.

The London Walker

The second of the three major characters is Stuart London, who runs a walking tour company for tourists and out of town visitors.

Once his wife and staff are able to run the business on their own, he sets out to walk along every street in London (at the rate of ten miles a day), keeping a diary as he goes (which structures much of the narrative).

Stuart's wife, Anita Walker (who is known to the staff as Boadicea), discovers his confidential diary on his computer, and tells him, sceptically, believing it to be a work of fiction:

"You realised that writing was much more fun than walking...

"Large parts of your diary are a shade too literary. The passages about that little Japanese tour guide, the sex passages, they really weren't very convincing at all...

"The idea worked as a literary conceit, but not as part of an actual diary..."

Statue of Boadicea and Her Daughters in London

Half-Japanese Sex-Bomb

Tour guide and book-shop worker, Judy Tanaka, was born in South London, but is a half-Japanese Madame Bovary. It's enough to make her a target of occasional sexism, racism and xenophobia. She confesses to her therapist:

"Sometimes I feel bombed and blitzed. And sometimes I feel plagued. Sometimes I feel like I'm on fire, and other times like I'm lost in a fog, in a real old-fashioned pea-souper...Greater London, c'est moi."

Unashamedly sexual ("I want to be fucked everywhere. In every hole. In every position. In every London borough. In every postal district"), she records on a map of Greater London all of the places where she's had sex, in a manner that recalls Tyrone Slothrop from Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow". Stuart describes her as "the best sex, the wildest sex, pure London sex".

Having regard to Anita's view of Stuart's diary, readers have to question whether Judy is just a literary artifice (as opposed to a literal orifice), whether of the character, Stuart London, or of the author, Geoff Nicholson, or of both, it's too hard to tell.

Naive as the characters might be, they know more about the author, the novel and each other than we do.


FOOTNOTES:

1. See the T-shirt Nick Cave is wearing in the video of "More News From Nowhere" in the Soundtrack below.


SOUNDTRACK (HALF-GERMAN, HALF-JAPANESE):
(view spoiler)[
The Raincoats - "No One's Little Girl"



P. J. Harvey - "The Darker Days of Me and Him""



P. J. Harvey -"Big Exit"



Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Deanna" (Acoustic)



Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Red Right Hand"



Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Nobody's Baby Now"



Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "More News From Nowhere"



"Janet is known to make dead men groan..."

The Rolling Stones - "Angry" (from the album, "Hackney Diamonds")



Teenage Fanclub & Jad Fair - "Behold The Miracle"



Teenage Fanclub & Jad Fair - "I Feel Fine"




(hide spoiler)]