The Cutting Room (Canons)

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It sets several narrative hares running at once, but the first thing to note is that it is set in the present.

The Cutting Room (novel) - Wikipedia

The world faltered on its axis, then resumed its customary gyration, a place of improved possibilities. Rilke quickly becomes obsessed with finding out: hints of something disturbing in his own past are given, and he is drawn into a bizarre world of amateur photographers, transvestite clubs and drug barons. It's less successful when it gets self-consciously literary and chimes off Girodias or Foucault, or presents its tombstone chapter epigraphs to lend some clout.In Rilke ("a gay auctioneer and accidental sleuth"), Welsh has created an unusual, memorable protagonist, while the novel as a whole can't make up its mind whether it's a literary novel with some genre fiction twists, or the other way around. There are also the usual drug dealers, an amateur filmmaker and a woman who makes a living posing nude in front of a camera. I'll need to take a look around before I can give you a preliminary estimate of how long it'll take. I loved the ending, in which Welsh, through the narration, makes us think that one character is dead but then pulls back on the scene to reveal her still alive. The story itself takes place over the course of a week, but Rilke's sense of time is highly fluid and not exactly precise.

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh | Waterstones The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh | Waterstones

The film was set to star Robert Carlyle as Rilke with a screenplay from Andrea Gibb, and was due to be filmed on location in the West End of Glasgow, but the project failed to materialise. In literature, however, I feel like it's less cheap—lacking the visual trickery seems to add weight to the device. I was desperate to find out the truth about the man who owned the pictures, even as I wondered whether Rilke's desire to make a buck would end up causing obstruction.Every disguise is cracked open and, as Rilke surveys it, his reactions are alternately steely and compassionate.

The Cutting Room by Welsh, Louise, First 9781841953830 - The Cutting Room by Welsh, Louise, First

To the extent that Post-Modernist works contain a story at all, the reader must do their own work to reconstruct the story out of the fragments.

I had a lot of people ask me about this book when they saw me reading it because they were intrigued by the cover and title and I told them that it was a lot like THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. When she decides to pick her belongings from Simon’s place, Stevie is shocked to find her boyfriend dead. He's in his 40's; his personal hygiene is a bit offhand; he's an auctioneer for one of Glasgow's less than salubrious auction houses and he's gay with a taste for anonymous sexual encounters anywhere, anytime. She wants him to dispose of her dead brother's accumulated belongings, and Rilke thinks he's found the good stuff that every auctioneer hankers after: the hoary collectibles and antique evidence of gracious living. I don't think there will be anything of interest to me, more fuel for the bonfire I suspect, but I would appreciate your discretion.

Louise Welsh, review: Squalid, sardonic and The Second Cut, Louise Welsh, review: Squalid, sardonic and

Whenever I think you're calming down something happens and I'm visiting the police station or the hospital. He’s not sure what he will do with them, but he will not be party to something that is certainly an aspect of cultural genocide, even though these particular books are considered to be abominations by a certain percentage of the population. Christ, I remember a time when you weren't bothered whether you had a glass or not, so long as there was some alcohol on the go. If graphic situations, morally challenged characters, and crime stories are your kind of thing, you are surely going to love this book.

So much crime fiction sacrifices depth of characterisation, feel for landscape and intellectual rigour to the demands of a racily paced plot. In 2011, Welsh participated in the International Writing Program Fall Residency at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. When summoned by Miss McKindless to her recently deceased brother's home, stuffed full with antiques, the likes of which Rilke's firm have never been able to get hold of.