Robinson - Hardcover

Petit, C

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224035525 ISBN 13: 9780224035521

Publisher: Random House UK, 1993

Synopsis

Set in London, this novel tells the story of Robinson, and it is a story of moral seduction. The narrator is drawn into Robinson's web, starts to drink too much, abandons his wife and job and eventually starts working for Robinson, first running a second-hand bookshop and second as an editor for Robinsons's increasingly bizarre and pornographic films. The book becomes increasingly intense - the weather worsens, London collapses, the moral uncertainties grow - and the images grow and proliferate- the sea, storms, death by drowning. At one level a traditional novel of character - Robinson and Cookie, time - the present and place - London, it is also a story of moral degeneration, voyeurism and sexual collusion.

About this title

About the Author

Chris Petit is a novelist and film-maker. His work in film includes 'Radio On', 'Chinese Boxes' and (with lain Sinclair) 'The Cardinal and the Corpse', 'The Falconer and Asylum' and a forthcoming film on the M25. He has also written The Psalm Killer (1997) and Back From the Dead (1999). He lives in London.

From 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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0224035525
• ISBN 13: 9780224035521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208