Souvenir

Souvenir is a 115-page elegy (not priced cheaply at £14.99) to London in the very late 1970s and early 1980s. Bracewell — an author whom I respect, per The Conclave and Missing Margate — attempts to capture the elusive zeitgeist of the era, the time of post-punk and early electro, a transition from seediness to glamour before the later excesses of Thatcherism. His prose evokes the era well, even if there is a slight tendency to lapse into psychogeography and the style (short, staccato) epitomised by Iain Sinclair. Much of Bracewell's vision of this period is shaped through music — valid for sure — but perhaps to the relative exclusion of other important cultural considerations. Bracewell also highlights the unifying importance of Eliot's The Waste Land to the 1930s generation, but identifies no equivalent for 1980s London. Nonetheless, a useful addition to the Gunz Library, not rated.

By Michael Bracewell