Robinson
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first novel from the visionary author and film-maker, Chris Petit.
Christo, working in the periphery of the film industry in Soho, has a crumbling marriage and a house in the suburbs. Then he meets the enigmatic and persuasive, Robinson.
Robinson leads Christo into a different London, full of alcoholism, excitement and depravity. Together, they start to make films together, convinced they can produce a masterpiece. Soon Christo wants out, but Robinson’s world is not one you walk away from. Will Robinson let Christo get out alive?
‘One of the most interesting London novels since the war’ Waterstone’s Guide to London Writing
‘Stylistically and thematically, the book owes a great deal to Ballard, with. . . a soupçon of Patrick Hamilton’ Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As viewers of his films ( An Unsuitable Job for a Woman , etc.) might expect, director/critic Petit's debut novel is mostly a mood piece of deeply cinematic inspiration. His tale of a shadowy entrepreneur prowling the shadowy world of London's vice rings expends much of its energy on trying to lend a dreamy, Wim Wenders quality to Soho's twilit streets. It certainly wastes all too little effort on cranking up the formulaic existential non-plot that his nameless, placeless narrator--a film editor on the skids--weaves out of the eponymous Robinson's dabblings in drugs and debauchery. Then again, that's undoubtedly the point: Petit has set himself self-consciously to ape the elliptical world of film noir , ``old thrillers with sparse stories and labyrinthine emotional worlds.'' Only when Robinson turns his energies to pornography does Petit jar his louche and lugubrious cast of characters into telling action. As Robinson moves from cheesy skinflicks to voyeuristic moralities, ``little vignettes on the nature of power and control,'' and finally to an epic pornographic folly which coheres only in his own pathological imagination, Petit accordingly scales up his own narrative into a grand fable of lost identities in a disintegrating cultural landscape. By the close, the story hovers at the edges of abstraction. Petit's mysteries ultimately amount to nothing more than atmospherics.
