2007 books

[peteryoung]

1) Neil Jordan, The Dream of a Beast, 1983
The world is changing, cities are being overrun by strange plants and some ordinary people are mutating into freaks. This first-person story of one such beast could almost be a narration of the breakdown of society into some half-functioning state, all awash with yellow light. There is little to stop this book more properly being shelved as fantasy, except that Neil Jordan is more concerned with the human condition and the internal emotional distances between people. As the outer strangeness increases so does the dreamlike quality of the narrative, so I can't quite see where Jordan wanted to take this or indeed if he actually succeeds in arriving. A difficult book to fathom, with little to guide the reader as to quite what he is getting at.