Communion Town; Narcopolis; Renegade
This year's Man Booker shortlist is revealed on Tuesday. So I thought I would squeeze in a couple of novels that teeter on the cusp of selection. Sam Thompson's Communion Town is a collection of inter-linked short stories that, as the sub-title proposes, narrate A City in Ten Chapters.
by Sam Thompson
Fourth Estate
(e-book)
This year's Man Booker shortlist is revealed on Tuesday. So I thought I would squeeze in a couple of novels that teeter on the cusp of selection. Sam Thompson's Communion Town is a collection of inter-linked short stories that, as the sub-title proposes, narrate A City in Ten Chapters. Comparisons have inevitably been drawn with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Julian Barnes' now seminal A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. The city in question is fictional, generally quite unsettling but in constant flux dependent on whom exactly is telling tales. We have a Conan Doyleish detective, Peregrine Fetch, a Slumdog Millionaire-ish rickshaw driver in love with his passenger, and a mobster story that wouldn't disgrace Raymond Chandler. The shifts in genre and tone are linked by talk of a murderous entity on the prowl, and a dandyish figure roaming the streets like an alter ego for Thompson himself. Sadly, the parts are larger than the sum of the whole.