Lux the Poet
Martin Millar
160 pp. Soft Skull Press. $13.95
Pub. Date: 5/1/2009
ISBN-13: 978-1593762315
Can anything be more amusing than a riot? With all that looting, loitering and littering, with the screaming and shouting, the killing and dying; it’s like going on a vacation in anarchy’s underpants and trying to avoid the skid marks chaos left behind.
Now that I phrase it that way, rioting doesn’t seem very amusing at all; in fact, riots are quite un-comedic, right up their with jokes about homeless llamas and stained glass. Hard material to even get a guffaw out of.
So using the Brixton riots of the ‘80s as the back drop for a novel seems a guaranteed recipe for a distinctly un-funny book. Unless the book is written by Martin Millar, in which case rioting takes on an unprecedented comic grandeur, putting its chaotic mug right up there on the Mt. Rushmore of funny.
The brilliance in Millar’s writing is his ability to take five or six disparate and highly eccentric storylines and blend them into a cohesive gem. The reason behind this is that Millar doesn’t just write great characters like no other, he also imagines characters that are so unique and so memorable that the reader can’t help being charmed and amused. It’s hard to read Lux the Poet without a smile on your face, particularly if you enjoy a caustic sense of humor.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading Martin Millar, and you are in the mood for a novel that makes quirky seem mainstream, do yourself a favor and check out Lux the Poet. Dare I say, it’s a riot.
Final Grade: 8.5 out of 10
