Faithless [Paperback]

John Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000

It's Soho in 1983 and Jeff has a new job working in a record shop. If you can call it work. Jeff and Frank could have a relationship, but that would mean talking about Ross, the rock star who left Frank to die. Instead it might be better to blackmail Ross.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

An earnest postmortem on the early '80s London club and music scene, framed in a somewhat formulaic murder mystery and narrated by a sadder-but-wiser punk band washout. By the time his fellow record-store clerk Neville is slashed to death in the shop, Jeff is already a has-been in the punk world. Dropped by band magneto Ross, who then swiftly became a pop phenomenon, Jeff has also had to suffer the indignity of watching a woman he might have had feelings fordark-haired, doe-eyed Frankpulled effortlessly from his orbit into Ross's. She briefly comes back to him once, full of venom but no less appealing; for a few weeks they scheme to blackmail Ross, a plot that goes awry, and then she and Ross disappear together. Shortly thereafter, though, Neville is killed, and Jeff thinks the killers meant to get him, in revenge for his ill-conceived scheme. He's ridiculed for this view, but his own amateur sleuthing nevertheless reveals the drug-ravaged, Mafia-cinched underbelly of London clubbinga bleak world in which both Ross's manager and Frank are part of the game. When the same thugs who knifed Neville come after Jeff, he narrowly escapes, only to be further endangered by another encounter with Frank, to whom he tells what he knows and who brings him face to face with the mobster responsible for Neville's murder. An unlikely series of events ensues in which Jeff not only survives but sees the tables turnedand lives on to reflect into the '90s on what might have been. Set wisely if plotted none too well, Williams's US debut has just enough true London grit to be engaging as a map of city life, a kind of nostalgic clubbers' A to Z in which intersections of style within the demimonde are artfully done. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

1994, Camden High Street, London. Punk is dead, a subculture shattered to pieces. Not for Jeff, protagonist of Williams' tragicomic short novel. Still emotionally entangled in the good old times, Jeff needs only a flash, a glimpse of passing Frank (short for Francesca) to trigger off his version of the (post-)punk scene of the early 80s. Looking back from the mid-90s, however, it's hard for him to provide a coherent account. "You were just there, you were a bystander," Jeff recalls Frank saying in a dream. Apparently her judgement is right: still feeling for her, Jeff is unable to talk to her about Ross, his former bandleader and her former lover. Passivity also best describes his part in the blackmail they try to pull on Ross. Williams displays Jeff's disposition in all its ambivalence: Mixing memory with desire, he feels the need to romanticize the past, a self-imposed loyalty that is the source of his inactivity. On the other hand, it is this slightly marginal position that provides the distance he needs to give a honest description of the generation that "came of age in the years between punk and Thatcher." In his off-beat narrative drive, Williams catches the spirit of the times: Faithless is a highly enjoyable fictional counterpart to the era's oral histories and the more sociological approaches of Greil Marcus or Jon Savage.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852425164
• ISBN-13: 978-1852425166
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,651,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Post Punk Blues, August 26, 1999

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Faithless (Paperback)

This book does a great job of capturing London in the post-punk days of 1983. The lead character, Jeff, is an ex-saxophonist now working at a used record store (a la High Fidelity). He's drifting aimlessly, trying to figure out what happened to punk, and what's coming next. Some shit goes down, a co-worker is killed, he's besotted by a woman who keeps coming and going from his life, and his life drifts in and out of contact with an old bandmate, turned semi-big time star. Chock full of bars, junkies, and music industry types, the plot is interesting enough, but the main attraction is the sense of time and place Williams imparts.