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Joel Lane is one of our best writers.His books are firmly of their place - Birmingham and the Midlands - and have a beautiful but bleak realist style. This is noir from the decaying and fraying industrial heartlands.Lives lived not in the mainstream or in the underworld but somewhere on between - arty, political, gay, counter cultural.This book is about loss of innocence - in politics, in love, of youth. A sense of trying to get back something that's gone for ever pervades. Some of the passages
2003 notebook: studenty view stuffed with indie tracks, fear of small town pubs, in-jokes. Lovely writing: '...trees made a jigsaw of the light, and dead leaves covered everything. Birch, sycamore, oak, beech. The only buildings were churches, so old they were like dreams.'Joel was in a writer's group with me and one of my dearest friends. He died in 2013.
This is a novel about identity - Neil identifying himself as gay, claiming gay/straight is what it's all about and then pulling away from that as what happens if / when you change sides? Were there any sides to start with? The rest of the world however may not be so forgiving - for example when he and another man are attacked physically by a man who is out with his (equally homophobic) girlfriend. Neil is not from Birmingham but from Macclesfield which gives him another layer of distancing — and...
I liked parts of this. There were sections of the writing which I thought were floundering, just like the character in the story, but perhaps that was the authors intent, even if that was the case it didn't entirely work for me.
(4.5) My copy of The Blue Mask has a quote from Joseph O'Neill on the cover. It says: 'Joel Lane's writing has the quality of dark glass shattered...' That's it exactly. This novel is fragmentary and elusive, studded with darkly enigmatic sentences like these (all from the first ten pages):The voice sounded lost, terrified, its message impossible to decode. (p4)The boy's eyes were pale blue and wide open, as if he were staring at something too bright and terrible to look away from. (p5)The field...
