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Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : J : Jensen, Liz
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Liz Jensen's new novel, War Crimes for the Home, has an unlikely heroine in Gloria Taylor, nee Winstanley, a game old bird who loves a good joke and is not afraid to call a spade a spade. Or a slut a slut.After a minor stroke, Gloria finds herself in Sea View, an old people's home with a nice big television in the lounge, where, if you look carefully through the big picture window, you can see the sea. There's also a problem with Gloria's memory. She may have Alzheimer's, she may just have selective memory loss-- or if you talk to certain members of her family, she may not have anything wrong with her mind other than a bit of deliberate Gloria bolshiness.
Gloria's son Hank and his family come to visit regularly and one day, a woman called Jill turns up and starts asking funny questions. Gloria would rather everyone just left her alone. It's bad enough seeing that little kid sitting on her bed dripping pond weed and blood most nights. She really annoys Gloria.
Funny thing is Gloria can remember so much about the war, when she and her sister worked in a munitions factory in Bristol and she met Ron, or Raan, the GI who initiated her in the ways of the flesh. One Yank and they're off too true! She can remember her first date with Ron, going to see the Great Zedorro, a hypnotist who got her up on stage and made her feel like a rod of iron. She can remember, the full gory details, the day one of the factory girls lost her arm and half her shoulder. And the day the telegram arrived about her sister's boyfriend and how Marge went off to drive ambulances in London and Gloria got lumbered with an Irish evacuee and her snotty kids. She can even remember much later, after the war finally ended, working as a pro back in London, where her Dad had worked the meat down at Smithfield market.
But there's so much more poor old Gloria can't remember. Things her son and the Jill woman keep ranting on about. Why do they want her to rake over all that boring old stuff? Why can't they just let sleeping dogs lie? What does it all matter now?
In War Crimes for the Home, Liz Jensen has conjured up a fabulously inventive, gripping tale; a sort of modern twist on the whodunnit, or in this case, who-dunn-what, with a very real, very spiky protagonist. Gloria bristles with indignation, speaks her mind however harsh it sounds and loves to shock with her filthy jokes and even filthier suggestions--which means that War Crimes is not for the prudish. It is however a wonderfully original but painfully raw story of an era when people lived in constant fear, hearts ruled heads and everyone lived for the moment. And Gloria was no exception. Although sometimes the moment turned out to be the future and people have to learn to live with the consequences, however unpalatable they may be. --Carey Green
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Science fiction is an unhelpful label but a useful genre. Liz Jensen's third novel, The Paper Eater, is undeniably SF. It has an artificial landmass; a computer that runs the entire country--Atlantica--but is only "the size of a home refrigerator"; and a social landscape in which new management and consumer languages are developed. With all the trappings of SF, this novel is at heart a damning and wild satire of consumerism run riot.On Atlantica, the artificial island that has based its success on accepting any and all waste from all over the world, everyone is a consumer. Libertycare, with its monolithic Head Office and automated Hotline Consumer Controls runs everything, keeping the customer happy no matter what:
"What Libertycare has done ... is to stop randomness in its tracks, by imposing a system of fairness that's respected worldwide ... The life of a typical Atlantican customer is not a string of random events. It is an incentive scheme in action..."
Harvey Kidd and Hannah Park are both emotionally stunted victims of "the death of politics" and, along with a strong cast of real and unreal characters, are manoeuvred by projected consumer trends and the wily, artificially sexy Facilitator General into becoming scapegoats for the system. However people, as Harvey observes, can sometimes win by being stupid. As the appearance of Utopia starts to fade, criminals and even geology itself return to haunt the terrible Paradise. --John Shire
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Liz Jensen's second novel, Ark Baby, is a dark, randy and riotous romp back to the future featuring twin plot lines as tightly twisted as a double helix. The novel (if not the story) kicks into gear on New Year's Eve 1999 when a sudden, heavy rainfall over Britain signals the end of fertility on the sceptred isle; with the turn of the millennium, every last specimen of British womanhood is rendered mysteriously barren. In the aftermath of this event, child-starved couples start turning to lower primates to satisfy their baby lust; enter veterinarian Bobby Sullivan, the hapless hero of Jensen's quirky meditation on evolution and survival of the fittest. After accidentally killing a client's beloved macaque monkey and being charged with murder, Bobby escapes to a remote northern seaside town called Thunder Spit and eventually gets involved with two slightly hirsute twins whom he manages to impregnate--the first fertile women in England since the millennium.Not content to chronicle Bobby's adventures in Thunder Spit around the dawn of the new millennium, Jensen weaves in the 19th-century adventures of foundling Tobias Phelps as counterpoint. Discovered abandoned in the Thunder Spit church by a childless vicar and his wife, Tobias is raised by the couple as their own, but his unusual appearance (squashed features, odd feet, hairy body) spur him to find his biological parents. As Bobby muddles towards 21st-century parenthood and Tobias gets tangled up in Victorian England's fascination with the theories of Darwin, the two plots begin to converge in a welter of diary entries, exotic recipes, strange artefacts and curious coincidences. By the end of Ark Baby readers might well conclude that far from being "red in tooth and claw", nature has one hell of a sense of humour.
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Liz Jensen's second novel, Ark Baby, is a dark, randy and riotous romp back to the future featuring twin plot lines as tightly twisted as a double helix. The novel (if not the story) kicks into gear on New Year's Eve 1999 when a sudden, heavy rainfall over Britain signals the end of fertility on the sceptred isle; with the turn of the millennium, every last specimen of British womanhood is rendered mysteriously barren. In the aftermath of this event, child-starved couples start turning to lower primates to satisfy their baby lust; enter veterinarian Bobby Sullivan, the hapless hero of Jensen's quirky meditation on evolution and survival of the fittest. After accidentally killing a client's beloved macaque monkey and being charged with murder, Bobby escapes to a remote northern seaside town called Thunder Spit and eventually gets involved with two slightly hirsute twins whom he manages to impregnate--the first fertile women in England since the millennium.Not content to chronicle Bobby's adventures in Thunder Spit around the dawn of the new millennium, Jensen weaves in the 19th-century adventures of foundling Tobias Phelps as counterpoint. Discovered abandoned in the Thunder Spit church by a childless vicar and his wife, Tobias is raised by the couple as their own, but his unusual appearance (squashed features, odd feet, hairy body) spur him to find his biological parents. As Bobby muddles towards 21st-century parenthood and Tobias gets tangled up in Victorian England's fascination with the theories of Darwin, the two plots begin to converge in a welter of diary entries, exotic recipes, strange artefacts and curious coincidences. By the end of Ark Baby readers might well conclude that far from being "red in tooth and claw", nature has one hell of a sense of humour.
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Science fiction is an unhelpful label but a useful genre. Liz Jensen's third novel, The Paper Eater, is undeniably SF. It has an artificial landmass; a computer that runs the entire country--Atlantica--but is only "the size of a home refrigerator"; and a social landscape in which new management and consumer languages are developed. With all the trappings of SF, this novel is at heart a damning and wild satire of consumerism run riot.On Atlantica, the artificial island that has based its success on accepting any and all waste from all over the world, everyone is a consumer. Libertycare, with its monolithic Head Office and automated Hotline Consumer Controls runs everything, keeping the customer happy no matter what:
"What Libertycare has done ... is to stop randomness in its tracks, by imposing a system of fairness that's respected worldwide ... The life of a typical Atlantican customer is not a string of random events. It is an incentive scheme in action..."
Harvey Kidd and Hannah Park are both emotionally stunted victims of "the death of politics" and, along with a strong cast of real and unreal characters, are manoeuvred by projected consumer trends and the wily, artificially sexy Facilitator General into becoming scapegoats for the system. However people, as Harvey observes, can sometimes win by being stupid. As the appearance of Utopia starts to fade, criminals and even geology itself return to haunt the terrible Paradise. --John Shire
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-
Liz Jensen's second novel, Ark Baby, is a dark, randy and riotous romp back to the future featuring twin plot lines as tightly twisted as a double helix. The novel (if not the story) kicks into gear on New Year's Eve 1999 when a sudden, heavy rainfall over Britain signals the end of fertility on the sceptred isle; with the turn of the millennium, every last specimen of British womanhood is rendered mysteriously barren. In the aftermath of this event, child-starved couples start turning to lower primates to satisfy their baby lust; enter veterinarian Bobby Sullivan, the hapless hero of Jensen's quirky meditation on evolution and survival of the fittest. After accidentally killing a client's beloved macaque monkey and being charged with murder, Bobby escapes to a remote northern seaside town called Thunder Spit and eventually gets involved with two slightly hirsute twins whom he manages to impregnate--the first fertile women in England since the millennium.Not content to chronicle Bobby's adventures in Thunder Spit around the dawn of the new millennium, Jensen weaves in the 19th-century adventures of foundling Tobias Phelps as counterpoint. Discovered abandoned in the Thunder Spit church by a childless vicar and his wife, Tobias is raised by the couple as their own, but his unusual appearance (squashed features, odd feet, hairy body) spur him to find his biological parents. As Bobby muddles towards 21st-century parenthood and Tobias gets tangled up in Victorian England's fascination with the theories of Darwin, the two plots begin to converge in a welter of diary entries, exotic recipes, strange artefacts and curious coincidences. By the end of Ark Baby readers might well conclude that far from being "red in tooth and claw", nature has one hell of a sense of humour.
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Liz Jensen's second novel, Ark Baby, is a dark, randy and riotous romp back to the future featuring twin plot lines as tightly twisted as a double helix. The novel (if not the story) kicks into gear on New Year's Eve 1999 when a sudden, heavy rainfall over Britain signals the end of fertility on the sceptred isle; with the turn of the millennium, every last specimen of British womanhood is rendered mysteriously barren. In the aftermath of this event, child-starved couples start turning to lower primates to satisfy their baby lust; enter veterinarian Bobby Sullivan, the hapless hero of Jensen's quirky meditation on evolution and survival of the fittest. After accidentally killing a client's beloved macaque monkey and being charged with murder, Bobby escapes to a remote northern seaside town called Thunder Spit and eventually gets involved with two slightly hirsute twins whom he manages to impregnate--the first fertile women in England since the millennium.
Not content to chronicle Bobby's adventures in Thunder Spit around the dawn of the new millennium, Jensen weaves in the 19th-century adventures of foundling Tobias Phelps as counterpoint. Discovered abandoned in the Thunder Spit church by a childless vicar and his wife, Tobias is raised by the couple as their own, but his unusual appearance (squashed features, odd feet, hairy body) spur him to find his biological parents. As Bobby muddles towards 21st-century parenthood and Tobias gets tangled up in Victorian England's fascination with the theories of Darwin, the two plots begin to converge in a welter of diary entries, exotic recipes, strange artefacts and curious coincidences. By the end of Ark Baby readers might well conclude that far from being "red in tooth and claw", nature has one hell of a sense of humour.
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Liz Jensen's new novel, War Crimes for the Home, has an unlikely heroine in Gloria Taylor, nee Winstanley, a game old bird who loves a good joke and is not afraid to call a spade a spade. Or a slut a slut.After a minor stroke, Gloria finds herself in Sea View, an old people's home with a nice big television in the lounge, where, if you look carefully through the big picture window, you can see the sea. There's also a problem with Gloria's memory. She may have Alzheimer's, she may just have selective memory loss-- or if you talk to certain members of her family, she may not have anything wrong with her mind other than a bit of deliberate Gloria bolshiness.
Gloria's son Hank and his family come to visit regularly and one day, a woman called Jill turns up and starts asking funny questions. Gloria would rather everyone just left her alone. It's bad enough seeing that little kid sitting on her bed dripping pond weed and blood most nights. She really annoys Gloria.
Funny thing is Gloria can remember so much about the war, when she and her sister worked in a munitions factory in Bristol and she met Ron, or Raan, the GI who initiated her in the ways of the flesh. One Yank and they're off too true! She can remember her first date with Ron, going to see the Great Zedorro, a hypnotist who got her up on stage and made her feel like a rod of iron. She can remember, the full gory details, the day one of the factory girls lost her arm and half her shoulder. And the day the telegram arrived about her sister's boyfriend and how Marge went off to drive ambulances in London and Gloria got lumbered with an Irish evacuee and her snotty kids. She can even remember much later, after the war finally ended, working as a pro back in London, where her Dad had worked the meat down at Smithfield market.
But there's so much more poor old Gloria can't remember. Things her son and the Jill woman keep ranting on about. Why do they want her to rake over all that boring old stuff? Why can't they just let sleeping dogs lie? What does it all matter now?
In War Crimes for the Home, Liz Jensen has conjured up a fabulously inventive, gripping tale; a sort of modern twist on the whodunnit, or in this case, who-dunn-what, with a very real, very spiky protagonist. Gloria bristles with indignation, speaks her mind however harsh it sounds and loves to shock with her filthy jokes and even filthier suggestions--which means that War Crimes is not for the prudish. It is however a wonderfully original but painfully raw story of an era when people lived in constant fear, hearts ruled heads and everyone lived for the moment. And Gloria was no exception. Although sometimes the moment turned out to be the future and people have to learn to live with the consequences, however unpalatable they may be. --Carey Green
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