How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Very good
Advantages:
Honest, direct, well structured .
Disadvantages:
sometimes life is fun .
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
No matter whether mounted on extending arms, like an acme gimmick, or suspended in air on a rotating stand, shaving mirrors smack of isolation. Be they double-sided or singular, magnifying plane or not, all they can hold is a face, no context, no company just you.
And so we meet young Young Adam, emerging from nowhere and pondering on the mirror image before him and the past it implies. The past and the image, we hear, are dislocated from his now, indeed so dislocated that he is unsure whether he is the image or the viewer, whether he is linked to the past or not. This then is a man adrift, lonely and without context suffering a solipsistic identity crisis.
Adrift indeed he is also on a cargo barge on a canal, an itinerant worker hired hand to a small family ferrying coal. Above board everything about his character is reiterated, his relationship with his employers is empty and cold, littered only with the social trapping of food, smoke and booze. There is nothing about this man that gives us a sense of belonging, rootless and alone he simply is.
A body is then introduced, floating in the canal. Adam and his colleague fish her from the mire, both bewitched by the semi-nude, bloated but beautiful corpse. We then follow them on their way, as Adam’s relationship with the family shifts as they meander to the drop-off point for their load.
We find ourselves witness to Adam’s loveless seduction of his employers wife, the ramifications of this and a gradual revelation of Adam’s association with the corpse. As we go the picture of Adam as free from the petty trappings of nice society are revealed. He simply reacts to the moment, there is no thought for the future the past, regret or morality or indeed any other such abstract concepts. He falls from relationship to relationship, driven only by hormones and opportunity and totally lacking in passion. He is then the classic anti-hero, not the kind of person you’d want your kids to be but then free and true to himself in a way you may wish you were.
Shocking to many, the actions or lack of that Adam undertakes are in every sense true to himself. More than this, as we discover, his actions are more honest than the petty morality and “do-good” mind set of the society in which he lives, a society that executes a man innocent of a murder that was never even committed.
Trocchi leads us through this turmoil of morality vs self with a deft and focussed hand. His direct, unreflective and unembellished prose re-inforces the character of Adam. The setting too emphasises this, trapped –seemingly- on a barge, adrift from the rest of society and moving only forward he brilliantly describes a self-involved lonely individual devoid of time and place only moving on.
In some ways it seems so real as to be autobiographical and in some hands this could easily have made the book self-indulgent and tedious, but as it is written with a direct brevity the tale whizzes by and is over before you have time to stop and think.
Of course that is not what you will hear about. What you will hear about is Ewan Mc Gregors nether regions, seemingly cut from the forthcoming film adaptation. You’ll also hear of sex scenes that could perhaps of benefited from more soft focus and a bit more kissing and cuddling. Indeed what you’ll hear is the petty minded voices of society that the book reveals as immoral, wittering on and on about nothing of any significance.
But that though is by the by, make of the film what you will. The book though is worth a flick through, whilst it may not be to everyones taste -lacking any development of other characters and giving a very skewed and narrow view point- it will give the chance to get to grips with a bad-boy Scottish writer who has so clearly influenced his countrymen of today.
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How does it compare to similar audio books?
Very good
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