The Vogue - Tapa blanda

Críticas

A wonderfully eerie, tragic read. I read it with my heart in my mouth. (Anna Burns)

Told in Eoin McNamee's trademark terse and melancholy prose, as salt-pitted and bleach-boned as the landscape it describes, The Vogue is an eerie, intense, haunted and haunting tale, with an air of chilling loneliness that seems to seep from the pages and into the very room in which you read it. (Lucy Caldwell)

'McNamee's startling prose perfectly reveals the ley lines of place, seamlessly links past and present and journeys deep into the human heart. The Vogue is a masterful demonstration of his sublime talent.' (David Park)

McNamee writes crime novels quite unlike anyone else, and this haunting story of betrayal and abuse at an airbase during the Second World War lingers long after the final pages have been turned. (i)

the real pleasure of this novel is in its noirish exposition of bleak townscapes and blighted lives. These are often evoked in explicitly cinematic terms (as when we observe Cole's comings and goings through Upritchard's surveillance cameras), but McNamee's compositions are much more Lars Von Trier than Ridley Scott, the frame filled with off-season melancholy and flickering marram grass.
The interiors are no less dismal, but just as rich in well-observed detail. McNamee's prose, too, is at its most satisfyingly flinty when he is setting out these sombre tableaux. . . invites comparison with such giants of the genre as James Ellroy.
Like Ellroy, McNamee conjures dark delights from dark places, places where there is "no prospect of anything other than more rain, more night"

'Anna Burns might recently have become the first Northern Irish writer in history to win the Booker prize, but the six counties have long boasted a roster of superb and subtle novelists, among them David Park and Eoin McNamee, the latter best known for Resurrection Man and the Blue trilogy.

With The Vogue, a desolate tale of secrecy and repression set in a depopulated coastal town, McNamee both conjures the braided ghost stories of the past and gestures towards many of their legacies, including the fate of unmarried mothers, institutional cruelty and the suppression of personal history.
Everything is filmed, and yet nothing is seen; in the trial of Hooper, time and space itself has been falsified and remade. And if McNamee's ultimate narrative purpose is to suggest that these secrets cannot hold for ever, he is thorough about it; by the conclusion of the novel, each character's story has pivoted a little, shifted from its moorings. What remains, however, is the implacability of prejudice - the sense that both the racism endured by Hooper and the misogyny enacted on all the novel's women must simply play out to a logical conclusion. Underscored by McNamee's fragmentary, elliptical style, the result is fiction at its bleakest, but carrying with it significant force and fury.'

Reseña del editor

'A wonderfully eerie, tragic read. I read it with my heart in my mouth.' Anna Burns author of Milkman An unforgettable novel of ghosts, lies and the the past, from the prize-winning Eoin McNamee Late 1944, and two teenagers dance the Vogue in silence on the projectionist's floor of the Pirnmill Aerodrome. She draws the outlines of their footwork in eyebrow pencil on the white sheet. He loses their bet. Decades later, a ghost returns to Morne to identify a body found in the shifting sands. Names have long since been changed; children long since cast out; lies long thought forgotten. Set against an eerie landscape, awash with secrets, The Vogue is a grimly poetic dance through the intertwined stories of a deeply religious community, an abandoned military base, and a long-shuttered children's Care Home.