Lovers And Losers - Paul Burston

Burston’s preoccupation in his novels with glamour, camp and gender-bending all find their natural home in his latest novel, an entertaining romp through the New Romantic movement of the 1980s, with some mild satire – or perhaps it’s a fond appreciation for – the post-celebrity platform of modern reality TV shows and tabloid headlines.

The story charts the progress of ‘A Boy And His Diva’, a fictional composite of The Human League, Culture Club, Soft Cell and numerous other sexually ambiguous acts from the heyday of the early 1980s. Put together by a young gay man, Tony with a rebellious young friend he once met as a punk teenager, Katrina, the duo ride the crest of the New Romantic wave, competing in the charts with the likes of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, while bitching in the press with Boy George and Pete Burns, only to share in their inevitable descent of the glamorous lifestyle of drugs and “artistic differences”. Many years later Tony’s manager tries to revive his career by contracting him into a reality TV show set in a prison – ‘The Clink’, but the former pop-star will also need to make amends with Katrina, if she can be found.

Despite some attempts to reflect on other aspects of the period with a subplot about a young man who has died from AIDS, Burston skims through the rise and fall of the New Romantics with shallow superficiality, with neither Tony or Katrina, nor their career as pop stars being depicted as anything more than a bunch of rock industry clichés. That said, Lovers and Losers is a fun read for those who remember the music and the outrageous fashion of the period with some amount of embarrassment and fondness.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blood Crazy - Simon Clark

Image
What do you look for in a horror book, or a horror movie even? Personally, scares don't count for much for me and I would prefer the situation to be at least half-way plausible and make a meaningful point about society and our attitude to death. So that kind of rules out zombies even if you want to hang a commentary on it about mindless consumerism. There are exceptions of course, and it's all the more impressive when you can be surprised by an unexpected new take on the genre. I got that with The Girl With All The Gifts and I've found that also with Simon Clark's Blood Crazy . While not exactly a zombie horror - there are no living dead here - Blood Crazy has a similar sense of a feeding frenzy being unleashed on society, and indeed the sides are drawn across pretty distinct generational dividing lines that does suggest there is a deeper commentary to be found here. But first of all comes the shock, and it comes fairly quickly. Staying a night at friend's house,
Read more

Triskaidekaphobia - Roger Keen

Image
Roger Keen's writing has a way of getting under your skin. That's undoubtedly down to the nature of the approach that can be seen in the hugely ambitious semi-autobiographical and metafiction works The Mad Artist and The Empty Chair , books that are practically designed to enfold and wrap you in their rich complexity, but there are similar rewards to be found in the dark imaginings of genre work like Literary Stalker . A collection of some of his short stories confirms the impression that no matter what style he works in, Keen has the ability to draw you in, exploring his own experiences and ideas while at the same time invoking and attacking the reader's own sensibilities, sensitivities and insecurities from every conceivable angle. Once you start on any of these tales, you are no longer on safe ground. So much so that I confess that halfway through the first title story I immediately checked the contents page to see if Triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) conta
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia - Simon Clark

Image
At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clarke to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure f
Read more