The Crypto-Amnesia Club

Reading Michael Bracewell's "The Crypto-Amnesia Club", first published in 1988, and featuring this pull-out quote: "the London party novel we most look forward to..." Time Out." - and in that phrase there are whole worlds...the first review on the back cover is from Blitz magazine, and undoubtedly where I read about it. Bracewell is more famous for his excellent pop cultural essays in "England is Mine", but he's a nifty prose stylist as well. 

I bought this book somewhere in London on one of my cultural smash and grab raids, usually in the company of my pal, Dietch. I'd go up to the capital a couple of times a year, and trail around Camden and Oxford Street and nowhere else...we didn't know about anywhere else. Besides, it was that London - you strayed off the path you could be devoured. Not wanting to be devoured tells you everything you need to know about the type 17 year old I was. 

I was doubtful about the book. It was almost too London. A slim volume, the spine in waspish black and yellow, and on the arty and stylish Serpent's Tail imprint. The cover looks like a suburban version of a Roxy Music cover now, but I didn't know that then. A bottle blonde in 80's monochrome presses herself against a large glass and steel box. It's over-lit and her face is quite shiny, but at the time of purchase it looked forbiddingly sophisticated - it would be utterly head-turning in Basingstoke. I have a feeling this book spent a lot of time traveling around in the pocket of my second-hand Crombie, to be whipped out in cafes to make me look fascinating. 

I haven't read it in over thirty years. I can't remember what happens. A chapter in and it appears to be from the perspective of the manager of a lightly fictionalised Groucho Club (!) and there's a longish passage on the club's phone-booths being resurfaced in red plastic. It's a postcard from another world. 

It's Bracewell's first novel, and it reads like a first novel: the tortured, stricken male protagonist, alone in a world he never made, the soft patina of sci-fi surrealism, the neo noir belle dame sans merci. Or maybe its just an 80's novel - that's what the culture was like then. People forget that since The Sorrows of Young Werther, the musings of a young white man discovering himself was the most interesting thing in the world. No wonder we've had enough of it. Mostly had enough of it. 

There's a phone number in my handwriting on the back page, and the name "Kilmore". No idea. I think Jim Dale plays a Dr Kilmore in one of the Carry On films. I'm not sure of the link here...

You can get a copy of the first edition of The Crypto-Amnesia Club on Amazon for a penny plus £2.80. It's worth less than I paid for it thirty years ago. A postcard from another world.