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| Catherine Johnson |
| Oxford University Press |
| 019275498X |
| Apr 2007 |
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Cultural expectations and prejudices are brought to the fore in Catherine Johnson’s pithy new novel “The Dying Game”. Shehana makes a promise to a dying prostitute that she will contact the girls brother, a decision that exposes her to a sinister underbelly of drugs, lies and the abusage of trust.
Against this backdrop, Shehana herself, a Londoner with Bangladeshi family ties, rallies against the fast-approaching marriage that her family feel is so timely but that represent a very real blockade to the future she herself aspires towards and her desire to enter higher education. Race assumptions are constantly subverted and just what it means to belong to a particular group and to identify ourselves within a specific set of cultural and social ideologies is probed incisively with by Johnson. This is a gripping thriller, with rich writing that envelops and engages from start to finish and that reveals the dehumanising influences of viewing the body as object, distinct from mind and personality. In parts dark, in parts disturbing, this is a smart and sassy novel with a strongly defined sense of pace and of purpose. A relevant and resonant novel that is well worthy of promotion.
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Drama: November 2007 Archives
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| James Jauncey |
| Young Picador |
| 0330447130 |
| Aug 2007 |
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Set in a none-too-distant future, the one-hundred-acre act has revolutionised land-ownership in Scotland inspiring riot and revolt. It is against this politicised backdrop that the novel opens with a tumultuous sense of drama and of pace. John witnesses carnage and inhumane destruction as he bids to make escape from one of presumed countless rural rebellions. Conscious of the danger that what he has seen has placed him in, he encounters Ninian a defenceless and seemingly traumatised child.
So begins a desperate plight to escape pursuers, to find sanctuary to seek assistance where available, but to be aware of the position and danger such a trust necessarily places himself and Ninian within. Jauncey’s ending to the novel leaves the swathes of problems over the nature of land-ownership and possession open and poses the chilling question as to whether we are in fact now fighting for the political and philosophical space of childhood itself…
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