Tribes - Hardcover

Stuart, Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385422636 ISBN 13: 9780385422635

Publisher: Doubleday, 1992

Synopsis

Nick Burns, a British film producer, is obsessed with obtaining the rights to "Tribes," a play about warring soccer gangs, but soon finds violence crossing over from his work and into his relationship with his girlfriend, Jemima

About this title

About the Author

Alexander Stuart has written film criticism and screenplays, and was executive producer of Nicolas Roeg's film, Insignificance. His first novel, The War Zone, won and lost the Whitbread prize. He is also the author of two children's books, and, with Ann Totterdell, of Five and and a Half Times Three, a book about the life and death from cancer of their young son, Joe Buffalo Stuart.

From Kirkus Reviews

Set in the contemporary London filmmaking world: a study of male aggression and violence--sporadically vivid but ultimately heavy-handed and simplistic. Stuart's hero is ambitious movie-producer Nick Burns, 29, handsome but slightly remote and cool. While finishing up work on a flashy thriller, Nick begins an affair with young publicist Jemima--who's just dumped her unfaithful husband and dotes on her three-year-old daughter. Nick finds himself more seriously, tenderly enamored than ever before, yet also given to violent fantasies: of rape, pain, abuse. Meanwhile, he manages, with much effort, to get the film rights to a hit play (called Tribes) about violence between rival armies of hooligan soccer fans--only to see the whole film project taken over by a Big-Name, egotistical, slightly mad American director. (``This isn't partnership, it's rape!'') And, in yet another unsubtle parallel development, Nick hires an actual soccer hooligan--a racist thug known as ``the Neck''--as his driver. (Presumably, the closeness of ``Nick'' and ``Neck'' is meant to underline the fact that both men are seething, in different styles, with violence.) The predictable upshot? Injuries at a soccer match; attempted rape; and an apocalyptic finale during the filming of a crowd scene--which provides Nick with a bone-crunching catharsis that allows ``him to recognize the truth of his emotions for the first time.'' Stuart (The War Zone, 1989), a not untalented writer, offers some arresting glimpses of seamy South London and a few convincingly nasty movie-biz sequences--along with lots of graphic sex and brutal talk. But the treatment of the violence theme here- -the power-games, the links between aggression and sexual insecurity, the hooligan in us all, etc.--is belabored and even, at times, sophomoric. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0385422636
• ISBN 13: 9780385422635
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177