thebobsphere's review
4.0
Will Eaves style is what I call minimally encyclopedic. This means that although there is an economical approach to his writing, the amount of knowledge is vast. Naturally since this book is a collection of Essays and reviews, the reader will be able to see how many different topics will be tackled.
On this front, Broken Consort does not disappoint. As expected the scope here is wide and deep. There are film, poetry and book reviews. All which Eaves uses as a springboard for other topics. His review of Harry Selick's adaptation of James and the Giant peach delves into Dahl's sexist and misogynistic traits which occur in his writing, while also how the the film and the book simultaneously break down these aspects of said traits. Elsewhere there are explorations of James Bond's character, queerness in literature, Robert Mapplethorpe and gay photography, how Nolan intellectualized Batman and dozens of other topics.
However it is the personal pieces which struck me the most ; The usefulness of a book's title, how a marketplace is similar to writing a book and some background notes on his last novel Murmur , which is his take on Alan Turing's life. I admit when I read the book at the time, I did see some bits as fuggy but this piece helps clarify some concepts behind the novel.
To be fair, Broken Consort is not the type of book to really read in one sitting. I see it as a 'dip in and out' sort of thing but the writing is excellent and there are fresh perspectives on popular culture. The reader will definitely get something out of it.
On this front, Broken Consort does not disappoint. As expected the scope here is wide and deep. There are film, poetry and book reviews. All which Eaves uses as a springboard for other topics. His review of Harry Selick's adaptation of James and the Giant peach delves into Dahl's sexist and misogynistic traits which occur in his writing, while also how the the film and the book simultaneously break down these aspects of said traits. Elsewhere there are explorations of James Bond's character, queerness in literature, Robert Mapplethorpe and gay photography, how Nolan intellectualized Batman and dozens of other topics.
However it is the personal pieces which struck me the most ; The usefulness of a book's title, how a marketplace is similar to writing a book and some background notes on his last novel Murmur , which is his take on Alan Turing's life. I admit when I read the book at the time, I did see some bits as fuggy but this piece helps clarify some concepts behind the novel.
To be fair, Broken Consort is not the type of book to really read in one sitting. I see it as a 'dip in and out' sort of thing but the writing is excellent and there are fresh perspectives on popular culture. The reader will definitely get something out of it.
arirang's review
3.0
Broken Consort is a collection of essays and reviews written by the Republic of Consciousness Prize and Wellcome Prize winning author Will Eaves and published by the wonderful CB Editions.
The pieces range over more than 20 years and from film reviews of the bond movie Goldeneye (1995) and Titanic (1997) through to a Covid 19 inspired piece on Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in the TLS in May 2020 (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/daniel-defoes-journal-of-a-plague-year-essay-will-eaves/), which begins:
Like a comet, its time has come again. Frantic and austere, the feeling for personal bewilderment running fast beneath the author’s plain style, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) brims with recognizable situations – the wealthy thundering down the road to Oxford and safety, the poor condemned by the riskiest essential employments (searching, guarding, nursing, burying), the revelation of powerlessness in authority, the joy of deliverance, and the shortness of memory.
It’s tremendous in every respect, as an invention sprung from fact, as a dramatic monologue, as a composition disordered by its own subject matter. To offset its evil charms, I’ve tried reading it alongside Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) – as different a novel as one can imagine – only to find strange resonances. In both books the act of fascinated witness has a sort of immunizing property, and Frédéric Moreau wandering the streets of the 1848 insurrection in Paris is uncannily similar to HF, Defoe’s narrator, making his way past plague victims screaming at their casements in London in 1665. In each description of chaos and disaster, the past tense is full of threat, because the past is where we’re all headed. I imagine scenarios for a film version of Journal and then watch the evening news: like Defoe, I’m inventing things that have already happened.
Several of the pieces are close readings of a books (or books on a similar theme) very much in the style of the LRB or TLS [and having written that, I discovered many of the pieces were indeed featured in the TLS]. Personally I always struggle with reviews of books I’ve not read on subjects I know little about, but the sales of the aforementioned publications suggests there is an audience for this, and Eaves is certainly a strong reviewer, generous to the authors and lacking in ego (unlike some reviewers in the aforementioned publications).
The more effective pieces for me were the more general essays, e.g. one on notebooks that begins:
Last week I lost a notebook and found it again at the week - end, my relief tempered by disappointment when I turned the pages and saw how little I’d used it. Notebooks are a writ - er’s workshop, says Somerset Maugham in the preface to his own published selection of sketches and impressions, but if so mine was deserted. Where were the great ideas and suggestive phrases? All I could see were offcuts and shavings, odd memos to an absent creator (‘put the pterodactyl after A comes round’). And, of course, the gaps in the record, the stories that stopped or weren’t written at all: ‘He was every - where, his head poking out of the fireplace, those wide eyes bobbing about in the soup.’
Entries in notebooks aren’t dated (a dated notebook is a diary), but omissions and changes in direction often signify a break in activity – illness, death, work – from which the writer returns in a different hand, re-inked by experience. What was I thinking all that time? What was I reading? Perhaps I was writing properly.
And for Murmur fans, the highlight may well be the piece that describes the novel and its origins, one it suggests aim at fulfilling Nabakov’s prescription for merging of the precision of poetry with the intuition of science (although as an aside, google can only find the quote in this form in the novel [b:The Winter Vault|4682252|The Winter Vault|Anne Michaels|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320533088l/4682252._SY75_.jpg|4732807] Anne Michael’s Winter Vault and (not presented as a direct quote) in the critical appreciation of the writer by [b:Nabokov's Mimicry of Freud: Art as Science|34259494|Nabokov's Mimicry of Freud Art as Science|Teckyoung Kwon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1494492851l/34259494._SY75_.jpg|55317572], the more usual quote refers to the scientist's imagination).
Overall - I found this a book best browsed for those pieces of interest. 3 stars
The pieces range over more than 20 years and from film reviews of the bond movie Goldeneye (1995) and Titanic (1997) through to a Covid 19 inspired piece on Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in the TLS in May 2020 (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/daniel-defoes-journal-of-a-plague-year-essay-will-eaves/), which begins:
Like a comet, its time has come again. Frantic and austere, the feeling for personal bewilderment running fast beneath the author’s plain style, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) brims with recognizable situations – the wealthy thundering down the road to Oxford and safety, the poor condemned by the riskiest essential employments (searching, guarding, nursing, burying), the revelation of powerlessness in authority, the joy of deliverance, and the shortness of memory.
It’s tremendous in every respect, as an invention sprung from fact, as a dramatic monologue, as a composition disordered by its own subject matter. To offset its evil charms, I’ve tried reading it alongside Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) – as different a novel as one can imagine – only to find strange resonances. In both books the act of fascinated witness has a sort of immunizing property, and Frédéric Moreau wandering the streets of the 1848 insurrection in Paris is uncannily similar to HF, Defoe’s narrator, making his way past plague victims screaming at their casements in London in 1665. In each description of chaos and disaster, the past tense is full of threat, because the past is where we’re all headed. I imagine scenarios for a film version of Journal and then watch the evening news: like Defoe, I’m inventing things that have already happened.
Several of the pieces are close readings of a books (or books on a similar theme) very much in the style of the LRB or TLS [and having written that, I discovered many of the pieces were indeed featured in the TLS]. Personally I always struggle with reviews of books I’ve not read on subjects I know little about, but the sales of the aforementioned publications suggests there is an audience for this, and Eaves is certainly a strong reviewer, generous to the authors and lacking in ego (unlike some reviewers in the aforementioned publications).
The more effective pieces for me were the more general essays, e.g. one on notebooks that begins:
Last week I lost a notebook and found it again at the week - end, my relief tempered by disappointment when I turned the pages and saw how little I’d used it. Notebooks are a writ - er’s workshop, says Somerset Maugham in the preface to his own published selection of sketches and impressions, but if so mine was deserted. Where were the great ideas and suggestive phrases? All I could see were offcuts and shavings, odd memos to an absent creator (‘put the pterodactyl after A comes round’). And, of course, the gaps in the record, the stories that stopped or weren’t written at all: ‘He was every - where, his head poking out of the fireplace, those wide eyes bobbing about in the soup.’
Entries in notebooks aren’t dated (a dated notebook is a diary), but omissions and changes in direction often signify a break in activity – illness, death, work – from which the writer returns in a different hand, re-inked by experience. What was I thinking all that time? What was I reading? Perhaps I was writing properly.
And for Murmur fans, the highlight may well be the piece that describes the novel and its origins, one it suggests aim at fulfilling Nabakov’s prescription for merging of the precision of poetry with the intuition of science (although as an aside, google can only find the quote in this form in the novel [b:The Winter Vault|4682252|The Winter Vault|Anne Michaels|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320533088l/4682252._SY75_.jpg|4732807] Anne Michael’s Winter Vault and (not presented as a direct quote) in the critical appreciation of the writer by [b:Nabokov's Mimicry of Freud: Art as Science|34259494|Nabokov's Mimicry of Freud Art as Science|Teckyoung Kwon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1494492851l/34259494._SY75_.jpg|55317572], the more usual quote refers to the scientist's imagination).
Overall - I found this a book best browsed for those pieces of interest. 3 stars
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