Tim Etchells

It's grim up North. It was in the 1990s, and apparently it still is. Old England is dying.

A combination of a 1999 collection and more modern pieces, these are dark tales which mix pop references, myth, social comment and everything else. Some of the stories work, but it's all very bleak.

Anyone looking to escape from the awfulness of the world right now, well, this is an unfortunate time to publish this. Interesting but ultimately too depressing. In Jarvis Cocker's introduction to this book he writes: 'I respect this book - but I never want to read it again.' Indeed.… (més)

The majority of this novel takes the form of a videogame walkthrough, by which I mean an online article written to help computer gamers who are stuck. The article ‘walks them through’ the solutions, helping them to complete the game.

It’s an interesting concept and I’m always keen to read books that use unorthodox narrative structures but The Broken World is a failure. The sloppiness of the walkthrough itself, which gives detailed descriptions of cut-scenes (those in-game movies that players can’t influence and would never need help with) and skips over complicated puzzles (which players almost certainly would need help with), can perhaps be blamed on our unreliable narrator. It seems he’s as hopeless at writing walkthroughs as he is at managing the rest of his life.

Harder to explain is the game, The Broken World. It’s absurdly constructed, packing in every videogame cliche alongside some genuinely clever ideas that would be impossible to achieve on any gaming platform that exists today - and in some cases are simply unimaginable as gaming concepts. This is important because it raises the question of how seriously we’re supposed to take the game. Is it a satire on those videogames that consume the lives of their players or is the story within the game meant to act as some kind of counterpoint to the book’s ‘real world’ story? If it’s the former, then the game doesn’t need as much space in the book as it gets and if it’s the latter then the game simply isn’t plausible enough to do the emotional job required of it.
Full review: http://www.26books.com/?p=326… (més)