Alan Glynn nails youth
Alan Glynn's Bloodland showed a sharp eye for the anaesthetizing power of buzz words. His new Graveland takes on an even bigger target than people who use words like brand and narrative seriously: Youth."They're nice guys, friendly, reliable. and a lot more savvy about all the tech stuff here than he is, but at the same time there's something about them that he doesn't get. It's a sort of dumb, uninquiring compliance..."I don't know how large this motif will loom in the book, and I'm not sure this passage is all that hard on youth. Glynn may simply be uttering the heresy, counterintuitive to lots of Americans, that youth are more. not less ready than older people to surrender to corporate control. (Put down your iPhone 5; I'm talking to you.) Still, it's not the sort of sentiment one is likely to encounter in everyday productions of the media-social media-industrial-advertising-entertainment complex.
It's early in the book, but Graveland has done nothing yet to dissuade me from a suspicion that Glynn may have more to say than any other crime novelist about the world in which I live.
© Peter Rozovsky 2013
Labels: Alan Glynn, Ireland
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 2:48 AM
3 Comments:
I happen to have just started Bloodland.
There lot's of good stuff about narrative, and brands, and taking it to the next level in Bloodland. I would, should the sort of people who talk like that ever pick up the book, if they would recognize themselves.
Oh, and changing "the conversation," maybe the worst of all because so seemingly benign.
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