A would-be suicide turns to homicide in the new novel by the author of Last Exit To Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr, published by Marion Boyars.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 7 June 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Peggy Reynolds, as we saw in the performance there of an extract, the task he has set himself is to write what is almost wholly a monologue in the voice of one character. Does he bring that off?

PEGGY REYNOLDS:
Do you know, I find it terribly hard to imagine who is going to read this novel except for a literary critic. It's very well crafted, it is a monologue except for the little passages which are in italic, which are very much like Virginia Woolf in The Waves, where suddenly you move into a third person. It is the man, but it is the person speaking, as well as sections of dialogue which are really fantasy sections.

Yet the story, in so far as there is one, is incredibly depressing, because it's about somebody who keeps going back to these periods of suicidal inclinations.

There is a central passage where he spends two days with a gun in his mouth, trying to make up his mind whether to do it or not. And yet, having begun thinking that, I then began to feel this sense of moral indignation that comes through in the other passages, as he quite arbitrarily picks somebody to kill because they have done something wrong, was quite exciting.

MARK LAWSON:
Ian Rankin, he is a difficult literary test case, because he's so associated with the sixties. A lot of people, when I said we were going to do this, said "Is this his first book since Last Exit To Brooklyn".

In fact there have been four or five. But he's so associated with the past. Does it still feel that he has a relevance here?

IAN RANKIN:
It does, although reading it, the notes I was making were things like existentialism and Beckett and things like that, which you would now think of as old-fashioned concepts.

I think he pulls it off in this book. It is an extraordinarily sustained piece of stream of consciousness. It's a very insular book, a very un-American kind of book. It hasn't got that huge breadth that you would get from a Frantzen, or Don DeLillo.

It's so concentrated. It never lets you away from the present, never gives you any back story, you never find out why this guy is doing it really.

You don't know anything about him, you don't even know his colour. All the way through, I was waiting for him to turn out to be black, but it didn't happen. You don't know who this italicised God figure is who is giving you this information.

I loved it, it was very much like Taxi Driver, getting you into that person's imagination. It's very apposite now, because in America, we have anthrax scares, people sending spores through the post, and here you are inside the mind of someone who is doing exactly that thing.

MARK LAWSON:
Paul, I shared a public reading that Selby did recently, and the audience was fantastically young. Ian mentioned existentialism. They saw very deep things in here.

The key line, the one in the reading there, "They made it impossible for me to live, and now they've made it impossible for me to die". Do you feel there is depth of meaning there?

PAUL MORLEY:
Yes, and I think it comes outside fashion. In the sense of looking back at things that have happened, it reminded me of an early Blue Note album, in terms of the great improvisation that goes on, and yet the fantastic structure.

Who's going to read this book? People who love writing. It's a fantastic demonstration of great writing.

But that improvisational thing was rather interesting, because it reminded me of a repackage of, say, an Eric Dolphy album. Whereas the original was 36 minutes, very compact and to the point, the nineties CD reissue would have other versions of it and of the solos, and other interpretations of various things.Towards the end of the book, I got a slight sense of that.

He had made his point very early on, and they were fantastic points and they were great.

Towards the end we were just getting other versions of the solos. The italicised element, which is either God, Jesus or the devil, we don't know.

I thought those solos didn't quite come off. That was a bad Bobby Hutcherson xylophone solo element. But as a piece of jazz music that transcends fashion and becomes very relevant to today...

It's outside this thing , "He's 74 years old". It's like, say, McCoy Tyner or something. It's just a great demonstration of writing, but completely tapped into an American thing that I think is very valid. It's not the Hollywoodisation, it's something else going on.

MARK LAWSON:
I think it's very interesting that Paul uses performance metaphors, because I enjoyed it very much, but then when I saw him read it recently, it goes onto a totally different level. There is a problem with it as a book really. It feels like a script for a dramatic performance.

PEGGY REYNOLDS:
And the first words are "...but obviously", so the sense of something having already happened elsewhere, although that said, the last word of the novel is "amen", so there is a structure, a shape, and a biblical and Shakespearean language as well as the improvisational music.

IAN RANKIN:
It is a book that doesn't so much end as just stop.

PAUL MORLEY:
It's a blowing session, it's a great Johnny Griffin blowing section. He is blowing, but in a way there is a rhythm section there, and there's the lead lines. I love the book for that because it transcends fashion and style. It's not a hip-hop album or anything, but it's a great piece of jazz. It's fantastic.