Everyone’s heading for the opening night of ‘La George’ restaurant in Soho.
The Ingredients: sassy Susan Ball, ex-stripper and wife of gangster Frank ‘Ballistic’
Ball is fed up with the good life in Marbella – drunken ex-pat villains in mock-Olde
English pubs. Frank is waiting for his share in an old bullion heist – ‘cept he’s shot the
other five in the meantime. He pursues his errant wife across the Channel whilst she
teams up with Frank’s accountant (George of ‘La George’), ex-ballroom dancer and
owner of half of Soho. A one-time TV chef has been hired to run the kitchen; he is a
full-time pervert who beds his bestfriends’ mothers. Combine at this point with the
maitre d’: a skinhead fraudster who has spent the last two years frying his brains in
Thailand, experimenting in Buddhism and developing his philosophy on the cataclasmic
effects of global wheat-eating. Finally, throw in a ‘self-styled, gun-slinging ‘natural
born gangsta’ and season everything liberally with cocaine. The leading players
converge on Soho for the opening bash and their paths fatally dovetail in a drug-fugged mayhem.
Nicholas Blincoe’s first novel, Acid Casuals, was published to much critical
acclaim, and this, his second, does not disappoint. Although complex the plot is compulsive
from beginning to end, and suffused throughout with hilarious moments. The
characters are flawed individuals (in some cases downright homicidal maniacs), all pretty weird
but very addictive. Frank’s sleazy and spineless sidekick, Cardiff, is a particularly
pathetic figure who meets a suitably gutless end. The language is powerful, blackly
humorous and ultra-trendy. There is a grotesque but funny scene where a body – found
melted to the restaurant hotplate – is disposed of by nailing it to the floor of a bus
amidst a shoot-out outside a south London nightclub. It starts as an Irvine Welsh-style
drugs fest but then the violence moves up a gear, culminating in a grossly macabre
disembowelling scene that surpasses even Tarantino in its pure depravity. The author
exhibits a vivid imagination and an obvious delight in exploring the seamier side of life.
The end product is a heady cocktail of degradation – definitely not one for the faint-
hearted.
Reviewed by Liz Rowlinson
