White Lightning - Softcover

Cartwright, Justin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340821752 ISBN 13: 9780340821756

Publisher: Sceptre, 2003

Synopsis

A motorcycle messenger goes into a small park in London to paint the words 'White Lightning' on the tank of his bike. This is the beginning of an extraordinary novel. It is told over the space of a few months, and in these few months one man's whole life - his failures, his successes, his longing for peace and fulfillment, his loves and his tragedies - are recounted. These memories include his film Suzi Crispin, Night Nurse, and - the darkest moment - the death of his son, which has haunted him.

He inherits a small amount of money and buys a rundown farm, where he dreams of creating an Arcadia. On the farm is a captive baboon, Piet, who becomes startlingly involved in his new life. He also has a love affair with a local woman, and becomes hauntingly involved with an African family of squatters. All the while the narrator contemplates his own life back in England and so the novel is also a sharp commentary on what Englishness means.

This is a novel about the human enterprise. It is surprising, tender, funny and utterly original.

About this title

Review

James Kronk, the protagnist of Justin Cartright's new novel White Lightning, is a man at the end of his tether. He has returned to South Africa, where he was born and grew up, because his mother is dying. Behind him, in London, he has left the shambles of his professional and personal life. His career as a film director, his supposed passage to redemption through art, has long since foundered and he is reduced to making promotional films for a doomed tourist resort in the Caribbean. His marriage was destroyed years ago by his womanising and by the overpowering, inescapable guilt he feels because, when his young son died, he was with one of his lovers, a body-double on a tacky soft-porn movie he was making. Back in South Africa, he sees a final chance of readjusting his life. As his mother makes her painful last journey, James buys a small farm-holding and tries to reinvent himself. He embarks on a new relationship, he involves himself with a desperately poor black family and he begins again to believe that he can make a film of worth and value.

In Cartwright’s funny, ironic and (ultimately) painfully sad novel, all of Kronk’s efforts come to nothing. The book’s title comes from Kronk’s teenage years as an athlete. Once, briefly, he was the fastest white runner of his age, nicknamed "White Lightning". As Cartwright’s complex and subtle narrative shows, he has been running all his life but has finally reached a point where he can run no more.--Nick Rennison

Review

Brilliant, dazzling, unsettling; subtle and haunting; complex and multi-layered; deeply moving (Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday)

A work of literary art, a mellow, beautifully constructed fable about the human hunger for goodness, it is by far the best thing Cartwright has done. (David Robson, Sunday Telegraph)

One of the finest novelists currently at work ... An altogether stunning achievement (D.J. Taylor, Guardian)

Hauntingly brilliant ... It is the best novel I have read this year. (Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph)

Apart from being a profoundly serious writer, Cartwright can also be an abrasively amusing one. Scarcely a page of this book fails to yield some pleasure. WHITE LIGHTNING is a book of substantial merit. (Francis King, Literary Review)

Beguiling. With this novel, Cartwright, a former Whitbread Award winner has put it all together - style, story, theme - to produce something exceptional. (Giles Newington, Irish Times)

Subtle and moving...Cartwright weaves the story of the man and the baboon with a magicians's delicacy...White Lightning underlines the intelligence and breadth of imagination that this former Whitbread Novel of the Year winner brings to every single paragraph of his work. (Daily Mail)

Justin Cartwright's new novel may well be his finest - in an already accomplished oeuvre. Wry, achingly true and profound without being sententious, it's a moving and bleakly funny look at life's hellish demands and occasional moments of happiness. (William Boyd, Guardian Books of the Year)

Cartwright is a wise and perceptive novelist, keen to probe the dark places of the human heart and the complexities of post-colonial Africa, and possessed of a laudable ability to capture life as it rushes past at terrible speed. (James Smart, Sunday Herald)

This is a moving story of a man totally alone, and a powerful evocation of a country yet to come to terms with its tragedy-strewn destiny. (Ros Drinkwater, LiveWire)

About this edition

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0340821752
• ISBN 13: 9780340821756
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256