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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com as evidence of the locals’ lawlessness and consequent unsuitability for independence; elsewhere, it simply fanned the flames of crude anti-Irish racism. Bourke’s exemplary scholarship teases out many such strands from this horrific case, evincing a powerful empathy for all involved. Occasionally, BUY Angela Bourke books online from and you may need to remind yourself that these people burned a woman alive, or stood around and watched while it happened, but by the time you put the book down, you at least have a greater understanding of how this gruesome event came to pass and why it still reverberates to this day. � 108 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Review [published April 1997] Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine Jason Weaver Before his passport read “novelist”, Michael Bracewell learnt his trade on the first rush of British style magazines. Much of Bracewell’s work from the mid-80s could be found in Arena, sibling to The Face but with a considerably higher brow. Sadly, the magazine got crushed in the publishing stampede that has instead brought respectability to top shelf reading. After the breakdown-and-prozac cocktail of his last novel Saint Rachel – a moving meditation on mental distress – Bracewell has resumed his former cultural commentary. This time the canvas is broader. England Is Mine purports to have a thesis but is more a collection of essays masquerading as a whole, short stories rather than a novel. His subject is pop. Does this mean pop as in popular, Pop as in Art, or pop as in Top Of The? Well, Bracewell would argue all three. I’m not sure he’s right. He claims that domestic art of the 20th century is always fighting for its own piece of England: “The rebels in England’s Arcady … are defending the Arcadian values that they love, passionately, from what they recognise as abuse at the hands of self-serving tyrants and BUY Michael Bracewell books online from and their occupying armies.” According to Bracewell, this Arcady satisfies the “need within the psyche of Englishness to look back to an idealized past…” Nostalgia is apparently intrinsic to our national culture. The title of the book comes, presumably, from a line in The Smiths’ ‘Still Ill’. Bracewell’s cause finds a strong ally in Morrissey, who sang “A rush and a push and the land that we stand on is ours”. Morrissey is the conscience of lost Arcady: beleaguered, revolutionary, pastoral and drenched in the perfume of the past. England Is Mine, however, wants to plot the entire century through these tinted spectacles. The opening chapter deals with the Culture And Anarchy paranoia of the new century and, in doing so, attempts to lay foundations. We drop in on Wilde and Waugh and Forster to see if they think Old England is dying. We take in a movie, a War and hear a few poems and songs. It isn’t always clear where we are going. I mean, who invited Enid Blyton to this party? Bracewell might be excellent on the fine details but his sense of overall design is rickety. Whenever his theme comes up, it seems frankly incidental. 109 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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