Квентин С. Крисп – лучшие книги

Unifying the influences of English supernatural tale and the micro-observations of the Japanese I-novel, and combining them with a trainspotterish psychogeography, Quentin S. Crisp brings you a monochrome novella that is either a paean to or a polemic against the drabness of quotidian Britain - his dreariest yet.

It’s 2013. Pop culture is dead. With human activity increasingly ‘updated’ to digital conformity, community is on the verge of extinction, and a weary, soulless, 21st century Britain is about to endure a phase of austerity imposed from above. As gentrification continues in London, a pitifully obscure writer is squeezed to the very outskirts of the city. At an ebb, he applies for housing benefit, stunned by depression and lost in the shuffling labyrinth of his internal monologue, tripping over the untied shoelaces of his mind.

What and where is Hamster Dam? Gary Weber, suspended from work after a distressing series of events involving his patient, Julie Wilcox, has had plenty of time alone to think . . . and remember forgotten things-to recall Hamster Dam. But was there ever any such television show, and would Hamster Dam itself be more or less real if there had been?

Brian Warfield, friend and work senior, oversees Gary's case, but he, too, is drawn into a secret world that he dare not tell of and dare not forget.

In this multi-faceted gem of uncanny science fiction, British author Quentin S. Crisp penetrates deep into our anxieties about the internet, offering a cautionary tale concerning the terrors in store for a world where there is no offline.

“There is a phase of melancholy – a phase that has sloughed all urgency - that seems to me always a revelation of that ancient, familiar thing, my true self. If there is anything in a person with which one may be in love, surely it can only ever be the self that such melancholy reveals. If there is anything in a person with which one may be in love, surely it can only ever be the self that such melancholy reveals.”

“The taxi ride was longer than he had expected, although perhaps length was not the only dimension in question. Still jetlagged, he had not kept track of time. Anyway, at some point he was surprised they had not stopped yet, and grew wakeful to watersheds in the city scenery around them. Instead of being the linear A-to-B he’d had in mind, the journey swelled like an ox-bow lake into something fuller and curvier. The tall and close-packed buildings that had limited the view fell away and the taxi entered stretches of those wide, speed-facilitating roads that are to cars as the ocean is to fish. The city then decorated the far rim and mid-distance of the view, as if its purpose was to add a grand scale to the sense of the car’s rolling freedom.”