New York Graphic by
Adam Lloyd Baker
pbk out September 98
(Gollancz)
at £9.99
Equipped with his Leica, Virgil roams the night-time streets of New York, looking for photogenic horrors. He wants a staff job on the Graphic, a tabloid that makes other tabloids look respectable. To do that, he needs the photographs that will make him famous. His only friend, Larry the con artist, plans a robbery that will make him fabulously rich. The two of them decide to work together.
Lloyd Baker is a cinema projectionist in Cheltenham, but this - his first novel - is spendidly surreal take on New York and American culture. It begins when a manhole cover, propelled into the night sky by the fermenting contents of a blocked sewer, falls into a parking lot near the UN building and slices off the head of a passing priest. Is it relevant to the story? Well, not really, but who cares? The book is almost worth reading just for the extracts from newspapers which act as intermezzos between the chapters. These may be real or fictional - but they are certainly bizarre.
This is not a book which has too much to do with real life. And it has to be said that the plot is slow and there are too many parentheses, actual and metaphorical. But the book is also well written, bursting with panache, and should probably carry a public health warning. Read and enjoy.
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
New York Graphic by
Adam Lloyd Baker