The final book club of 2015 read random (2008), a short, moving poetic play by young black British playwright, debbie tucker green. As well as wanting to coincide with the forthcoming debbie tucker green symposium – http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/debbietuckergreen.html –  I was also keen to introduce an exciting new playwright who I suspected the readers wouldn’t have come across before.

In random, a single actress (originally played at the Royal Court Theatre by Nadine Marshall) performs multiple roles: sister, brother, mother and father, and for much of the time speaks directly to the audience. It starts off as an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary black family in London, but half way through it becomes clear that the brother, a teenage schoolboy, has been fatally stabbed in a random attack. The rest of the performance conveys the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the remaining family members, as they are informed of brother’s death by the police, visit the site where he was stabbed, and go to the morgue to identify his body.

Initially there was a mixed response to the play: many readers were moved by it, felt connected to the characters and thought that the experience of grief was related in a way that had universal applicability. But a few readers disliked reading a play with such upsetting subject matter, and one reader found it difficult to understand the language, which in places uses street patois.

All readers seemed to enjoy watching youtube clips of scenes of various performances of random and discovered a new appreciation of the peculiarly beautiful poetry and rhythm of debbie tucker green’s language. They also commented on the manner in which actresses mediated the language in ways they didn’t expect. This led to an interesting discussion about the multiple interpretative possibilities of play texts.

Readers also enjoyed having PhD student, Jessica Day, present for the discussion and an interesting cross-generational conversation about language use seemed to arise as a result of Jess’s presence.

In the end, while all readers admitted that they wouldn’t have chosen this play to read themselves, most were happy to have read it and would be interested in seeing a play by debbie tucker green if one was staged in Lincoln.

Dr Siân Adiseshiah

The book club session on 22 August was my first with the group and, due to a personal interest in the work of J.G. Ballard, which I’m hoping to pursue as a research project, I suggested Super-Cannes as our group read (as much as anything because it’s the first novel by Ballard to have been published in the current century). In the end that proved to be an… interesting choice. Ballard has produced several works that can, at the very least, be described as challenging – most notably Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition – but Super-Cannes is often seen as one of Ballard’s more approachable later novels.

That word, “approachable”, requires a few definitions, such as “approachable enough to throw brick bats at it.” The group almost entirely disliked the book upon their initial reading, yet as I’ve often found when teaching Ballard this leads into extremely fruitful territory. For those unfamiliar with Super-Cannes, it follows the arrival of Paul and his young wife Jane at a luxurious, gated society – Eden-Olympia – in the south of France, which is recovering from a mass murder committed by a member of its elite. Paul quickly discovers that the serpent has wounds his coils throughout the divine setting of this community, gradually moving from detective to sociopath as he increasingly participates in the drug taking, prostitution and violence that the inhabitants of Eden-Olympia are prescribed by a rogue psychologist, Wilder Penrose, to cope with the boredom and stresses of their existence.

The group had no sympathy at all with Paul nor (and this was a slight surprise to me) his wife, though in the case of the protagonist I indicated that this was a general tactic on Ballard’s part. In almost none of his novels does he ever present a sympathetic main character, but is more generally concerned with the barely repressed psychopathology of everyday life. Indeed, this refusal to provide routes that could allow us to empathise with the events of the novel is structured into its very end – with everyone believing that it was unsatisfactory and only I suggesting that such dissatisfaction was the very point of the novel. Rather than allowing an act of supposedly cathartic violence, the novel concludes with Paul’s fantasies of destruction that are unlikely to change such a corrupt society.

It was while engaging with such deliberate literary strategies on Ballard’s part that the discussion became particularly interesting. Although I indicated my own dislike of interpretations that rely upon an author’s biography, we did discuss the context of Ballard’s most famous novel, Empire of the Sun, and how his experiences of a concentration camp during the Second World War partially influenced his interest in the social and psychological causes of violence. It was also during this discussion that readers began to suggest where real sites of empathy could exist, with some of the minor, secondary characters – the cleaners, security guards and immigrants – who are subject to the perverse desires and actions of the gods of Eden-Olympia.

Throughout the session, many members of the group remarked that while they found themselves repulsed by or, at best, cold towards Paul and his situation, they were affected by Ballard’s elegant and exquisite descriptions of the world of Super-Cannes and its hyper-modern evocation of a twenty-first century paradise, complete with the devil as psychopath. This was also provided me with some of my most pleasurable experiences with the group, that while actively disliking the novel the group very quickly realised why I had selected it and that it was the type of book they would not normally have encountered, an avant-garde dissection of human psychology masquerading as a crime novel.

Jason Whittaker