This is a bit too self consciously weird and there is a bit too much going on, but it does eventually coalesce into some sort of sense. There is some fun with a Google street view connected time travelling spaceship and street attacks become bullfights. I'm not sure I entirely understood it or connected with it, but it was definitely interesting! ( )

“Different doesn’t need to be scary. It can be fun,” says Isabel Waidner in a Guardian interview on the occasion of the release of their new novel, Sterling Karat Gold. The book takes a zany, surrealist route in exploring issues of racial, sexual, and class oppression in modern day Britain. For every brutalist migrant detention center, there’s a micro-dragon and a living pink fountain with a black hole in its center. For every murder of a racial/sexual minority, there’s a bullfight that goes to penalty kicks. In its best bit, there’s a time-traveling spaceship that operates through the channels and limitations of Google Street View.

The characters here live on the edge in more ways than one. Their vulnerability is expressed brilliantly in the naming of their two-man amateur drama series staged periodically in a cheap flat: Cataclysmic Foibles, which has a central role in the novel (Justin Fashanu, mentioned below, was a black and gay professional footballer for those like me who didn’t know already):

Take Cataclysmic Foibles, the name, which referred to a state of precarity in which any foible, character flaw, or momentary slip up can and will have cataclysmic personal consequences, imagine, e.g., that all you did was walk down Delancey Street, white football shirt wrapped round your waist like a skirt… That’s what years ago we somewhat childishly, imprecisely - liberally, even - called a cataclysmic foible, the fact that you wore that stuff, the skirt in particular, the fact that it was never actually about your clothes but always about you, and that if you hadn’t worn this or that skirt, or those socks, you would’ve had the exact same thing coming, the kind of thing, Justin Fashanu, that doesn’t happen to everybody, but that happened to us, Justin, and to you, a lot, that’s why we developed a language around it, we were kids, didn’t care for the precise or even correct use of words, we still don’t, we care for their capacity to give life, and to take it away.

The plot has Sterling, our central character, on trial for something or other, basically for being himself, whatever the official reason, as suggested in the above passage. But this is surrealism, so the judge has the body of a crustacean and reigns above a hole in the floor in their flat, with the assistance of an AI-run drone armed with knives.

Does it all make for fun? Surrealism is not really my favorite so ymmv on that, depending, but be aware that there is a twist at the end, twice; in that Guardian interview, Waidner puts us all on note: “don’t think we’re so harmless”. ( )

I can very easily understand why someone would dislike this but for me reading it and the depiction of living as yourself, as trans, and the hate that people have you for cause you're visibly different and the desperateness of wanting everything to be better and maybe if you see things differently maybe it can all be better... Idk it's a powerful novel and the fantasy imagery is amazing and beautiful and then sometimes it's horrible and scary and miserable too at the same time. Because so much of the novel is tied up in the fantastical it's hard to talk about it well but also I really reject the sort of "oh it's just random and doesn't make sense" type stuff even some of the positive reviews say. You have to let go of the thought "what really happened here" but the book makes that clear from the very start, when there's a bullfight on the streets of Camden Town. The imagery felt to me so clearly tied into the reality of the violence of the state and the way being trans or a migrant makes you a constant target. The narrator is someone who does improv theatre in their tiny flat - in that context it all makes sense, and even all the weird stuff like a courtroom scene where a frog acts as judge and jury feels very representational and/or illustrative of real things.

I guess maybe obviously too as a trans person I felt a lot closer to the text than I would otherwise. The narrator is trans-masc and gay? and their friends broadly seem to be too. And the novel seemed to be conveying something of the experience of being trans very clearly - the feeling of being you, of carving out your own place in the world, of carrying your identity with you everywhere, even when you're not "visibly" so, the pain of how you get treated by the state and strangers in the street, the way you and your friends are always wanting something different, to make the awfulness you're around go away, how hard it is but how much you try to create something new and better, no matter how small. To me the not-reality-based nature of much of the narrative felt like a perfect complement to the reality of trans life. Hoping and working for something better, even if right now it feels imaginary... idk. I think it all fit together really well. Idk how well it would work for everyone else so I worry about talking it up too much. But yeah. It was good. ( )

Solid Gold Fun
Review of the Peninsula Books paperback (June 2021)

A definite 5 stars for this latest from Isabel Waidner which is possibly even more fantastical and surrealist than the previous outings Gaudy Bauble (2017) and We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019). With imagery drawn from Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (1932) through to The Beach Boys Smiley Smile (1967) and a courtroom presided over a judge looking like something out of Hieronymus Bosch's Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) and a set of injustice enforcers dressed as matadors (which is the Spanish word for "killers") you know that you are in for a wild ride. Oh yes, and there are time machines which set their coordinates by referencing the street views of Google Maps if you needed any further encouragement.

Recommended for fans of surrealist science and fantasy fiction, or just anyone looking for what fun can be had with a wide ranging imagination.

See image at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/MatadorEarly20thCentur...
A photograph of a matador (circa 1935). Image sourced from Wikipedia.

See image at https://img.discogs.com/IiVHSlfya5DnNghAf3m_KvsweuI=/fit-in/600x598/filters:stri...
Album cover for The Beach Boys album "Smiley Smile" (1967) which includes the small animals referenced in Sterling Karat Gold. Image sourced from Discogs.

I read Sterling Karat Gold as the June 2021 selection from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month (BotM) club. Subscriptions to the BotM support the annual Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers. ( )