| Tuesday, August 21, 2001 |
 | Recently read: Little Green Man by Simon Armitage. I'm a great admirer of Armitage as a poet; he is one of very few writing in the British Isles who presents a convincing argument for buying new collections whenever they come out. As a playwright, I have reservations, but Mister Heracles and his eclipse play both have enough stylistic heft to justify investigation. As an essayist he is patchy but often both charming and interesting. And as a novelist...
Hmmm. There's no shame in playing to your strengths. Which is not to say that Little Green Man is a bad novel. It isn't. As a mid-life crisis retelling of Lord of the Flies, set in an unidentified Yorkshire town, it is a perfectly good story. It has plot, characters, conflicts, everything you might expect. But, when reading it, I found that the parts I enjoyed had elements of the tough, aphoristic character of some of the poems in Book of Matches. And you realise that his accounts of growing up, of Subutteo pitches, five-a-side football and penny sweets, don't really feel new. There isn't the sense of the alienation of familiar things that so often makes his poetry involving. And, although it may be a response to thirtysomething Hornby/Parsons slurry, by engaging at all it is bound by some of the same terrible smallness.
So, not a bad novel. But perhaps a bad use of time.
Oh, there's a review here, which says about the same but takes a lot longer to do it. And an interview with Armitage here, which may provide another perspective.
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