Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > The Edge of the Object

This book is published by the boutique publisher Half Pint Press – run “out of a back bedroom” in South London by Tim Hopkins – who correctly describes himself as a book artist.

Previous publications have for example included “The Sea’s Better Plans” by Eley Williams (2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize winner for “Attrib.”) – six poems printed on a Mobius strip inside a flip top jar.

This is their first novel, some 5 years or so after their founding, but the idea of the book was one of the original projects which lay behind the conception of the press (as the author is friends with the publisher and wrote the book more than 25 years ago only to fail to find a publisher prepared to take on the concept).

The production of it is (as would be expected) excellent – three glossy style A4 books (making up a French tricolour) in a cycling-themed sleeve – and with the first and third volumes presented with each page as a single snapshot of life (the choice of phrase by me is deliberate as the first party narrator is a photographer, albeit one without a camera) presented in the form of a calligram.

The effect is on one level distinctive, but I think for anyone with young children (or young enough to remember their own primary school days) is simply reads like a collection of “shape poems” albeit with little attempt to accept an Oulipian constraint to size the lines of the poem within the constraints of the shape, as the text is normally just blocks of prose with right/left justification and hyphens used as needed.

Actually, using the word shape poems or calligrams is not quite accurate as more often than not the shape (which reflects something of the text – be it the Eiffel Tower, a cat, the Tour de France Mountains jersey, a wine bottle, a candelabra etc etc) defines the negative space on the page with the text filling the rest. Again, while a little different the main effect is to make the text slightly harder to read given the sometimes quite wide mid-line breaks on a page size which is already much larger than a normal novel.

My personal issue though was with the text itself which is really quite a simple if not rather cliched story and very much not of the type I would normally read.

The narrator (an indie band photographer) has fled London after a relationship breakdown, without his camera. The first part is a combination of a cycle ride in France and then a spell living in a derelict cottage in the Normandy countryside – this is far from say Graham Robb or even Tim Moore standards (and with too many dreams and an ill-advised foray into excretion). The second seems him joining some indie-bands touring France – and is an again a combination of two rather cliched genres – Paris travel book (With some very predictable observations on how Paris differs from London) and then a very tame version of the band tour diary. And the third section I found the weakest of all as the narrator (who seems to regress in age to a teenager) becomes obsessed with a disinterested French girl he met briefly in the second section – and by the end I was scanning the text more than reading it.

So overall a book which I felt was very distinctive in form and very much not so in substance.

My rating reflects my own reading enjoyment but this is a beautiful production by a very special small press.