Human Punk - Softcover

King, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224060481 ISBN 13: 9780224060486

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

For Joe the summer of 1977 meant punk rock, fun and violence. Fast forward to 1988 and Joe is on the Trans-Siberian express coming to terms with his best mate's suicide back in 1977. In the present Joe still has to come to terms with Smiles's death.

About this title

Review:

In Human Punk, the coming-of-age tale of a Thames valley likely lad, John King yet again delivers an unflinching, frank insight into British male working-class culture. King's best-known previous novels, The Football Factory and England Away, centred on the brutal subject of soccer hooliganism--of the domestic and export variety.

The antihero of Human Punk is Joe Martin: poor white trash from the council estates of Slough. In the novel's first third, set at the "arse-end of the 70s", Joe is a teenage no-hoper into cheap booze and cheaper girls. He's also into the new punk music that has finally percolated down to the Middlesex hinterlands.

King captures Joe's humble yet never-to-be-forgotten adolescent excitements--"the tingle of the cider" and the "smell of Bev's perfume banging into me"--with such empathy and verve that, in its praise, you can't help sensing the autobiographer at work rather than the novelist.

Unfortunately, the following sections of the novel aren't as telling. First it flashes forward to the late 1980s, when Joe is a backpacker returning to Blighty, as the prodigal son, on the Trans-Siberian railway; then it moves on to glitzy New Labour London of the millennium, where Joe is a moneymaking DJ. Throughout it all Joe broods on a childhood incident when a friend was nearly drowned, and the solving of this "puzzle"--his pal's fate--is what provides the book with its denouement. However, these later sections fail to grip the reader as it is difficult to afford the older, harder Joe the same sympathy one gave his youthful incarnation, and without such identification the whole book lacks psychological Semtex.

Fans of King's bleak, staccato, first-person narratives will not be disappointed by his now familiar but explosive insights into the male psyche.--Sean Thomas

Review:

"In its ambition and exuberance, Human Punk is a league ahead of much contemporary English fiction." -"New Statesman "King's eye for detail is as sharp as his characters' tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and ******-up the next." -"The Face "Unique and brutal fiction...King is a master of idiom and street slang." -"The Times "King's most accomplished and compelling story to date." --"Esquire

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0224060481
• ISBN 13: 9780224060486
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352