The Grid - Softcover

Reed, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0720613035 ISBN 13: 9780720613032

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers, 2008

Synopsis

Christopher Marlowe and his Elizabethan set are reincarnated in a near-future dystopian London on the brink of destruction, battling AIDS and trapped by their shared past.

 

A typically original and erotically charged novel by one of Britain's most idiosyncratic writers, The Grid is set in the not-too-distant future, when Britain is ruled by the autocratic Commissar, London has merged with Tokyo and police use flying cars to combat rogue Boeing pilots doing kamikaze stunts over the capital's skyscrapers. Amid the dystopian chaos a group of men attend a mysterious hypnotherapy clinic called the Grid to receive treatment for AIDS—but as the therapy progresses they begin to realize that they are, in fact, reincarnations of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and other members of the dramatists' Elizabethan circle, including Nicholas Skeres, Henry Wriothesley, and Thomas Walsingham. As the past merges with the present they find themselves embarking on a journey that leads to the resolution of one of the all-time great literary mysteries—the murder of Marlowe in a Deptford tavern in 1593—as well as one the most extraordinary finales in recent British fiction.

About this title

About the Author

Jeremy Reed is the author of seven novels and five works of nonfiction. He has won the National Poetry Competition, the Eric Gregory Award, and the Somerset Maugham Award. He is also the author of well-received biographies of Lou Reed, Marc Almond, and Scott Walker.

Reviews

Kit, the scheming screenwriter at the center of Reed's latest novel, inhabits a future London where a militant Commissar is in power, the Japanese have immigrated to the city in droves, and a new treatment for AIDS has a perplexing side effect. After Kit undergoes treatment at a mysterious medical center known as the Grid, he begins to unearth memories that belong to none other than Christopher Marlowe, incidentally the subject of a screenplay Kit's under contract to write. As Marlowe's memories become overwhelming, other Grid patients begin contacting Kit to share recovered memories of their own, including all the key figures surrounding Marlowe's murder. As the memories become more vivid, threatening to swallow the men's current identities, the group seeks to unearth the true circumstances of Marlowe's death. Reed's zeal for Marlovian history bogs the narrative down in names, dates and facts, further strained by the book's dystopian backdrop and future-punk posturing, with lots of name-dropping and little explanation. (Dec.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0720613035
• ISBN 13: 9780720613032
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240