Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals
From the Emmy Award-Winning Writer of Succession
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A group of students head into a war zone, armed only with 'the power of theatre' in the first novel from the Emmy award-winning creator of Succession and Peep Show.
It's 1994 and a gang of good-hearted young people set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. Their aim is to light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war.
Andrew would love to stop the war. But what he'd also love to do - perhaps even more than stop the war - is sleep with Penny. Does Penny like him though? Or does she love Simon, Andrew's rival, an irritatingly authentic Geordie poet? Or Shannon, the fierce, inspiring American leader of the troupe? And how will this all play out in a war-zone where all the rules have been abandoned?
'Original, unabashed and irresistibly funny' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first novel, Armstrong, an accomplished film and television writer (Veep, Black Mirror), directs his wonderfully arch gaze on a vanful of do-gooders venturing into war-torn Yugoslavia. Following in the footsteps of Susan Sontag, who famously staged Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, the motley collection of activists decides to "take a peace play to Bosnia and extend the evolution of humanity to a new continuum." Armstrong satirizes the group's na vet , pretentiousness, and blinkered humanitarianism masterfully, all the while sketching a convincing portrait of the Balkans in chaos. Narrating the fiasco is Andrew, a British construction worker with "one of the most coherent foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Manchester area." He is motivated less by a conviction that the play will succeed than a crush on one of the group's members, Penny, the beautiful daughter of a well-connected lobbyist who strongly disapproves of the mission. Andrew is a Lucky Jim type, alternately feckless and impish, who gets himself into a series of mortifying or perilous situations, living to tell about it in his amusingly ironic voice: "It was just so dangerous to bury bombs where people might walk," he complains after wandering into a minefield. He is also fundamentally decent, and, unlike some of his companions, a keen observer of the farcical, futile mission. Like the best comedic war literature, Armstrong's novel is ultimately a tragedy of the absurd.
