Tribes

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

Preoccupied with dark and destructive passion, this lean novel by the author of War Zone , set within the London film industry, never quite leaves the ground. Protagonist Nick Burns, a young British producer, has achieved success via a combination of personal charm and controlled aggression. With his girlfriend, Jemima, Nick attends a new play that transplants the violence and hooliganism surrounding British soccer matches to a mythicized, tribal London. Fascinated, Nick seeks to produce a film version, meanwhile reinterpreting the manifestations of violence in nearly every aspect of his own life. Stuart's tepid narrative, however, evokes neither the setting nor the substance of its players nor the explosiveness that is its obsession. Throughout, Stuart prefers to describe rather than demonstrate both the motives of his characters and his own rather interesting ideas. Accordingly, his tale loses its subtlety and becomes anemic, taking on a tone that is more intellectual than dramatic.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.