“Where there's trouble there's poetry”
Seems appropriate to share this on what is World Book Day. Following last month’s recommendation (James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time), Duncan Jones has posted his third selection for the Bowie Book Club on Twitter. It’s Spike Milligan’s Puckoon.
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Duncan Jones @ManMadeMoon Feb 27
For those keeping up, and those not, let’s reward our hard work with book #3! Spike Milligan’s hilarious tale detailing the fantastical notion of an Irish partition being screwed up by beaurecrats. PUCKOON. Oh yeah... published in 1963! All you need to do is finish by end of March.
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Here’s the synopsis for Milligan’s 55-year-old classic slapstick novel.
Spike Milligan - Puckoon
In 1924 the Boundary Commission is tasked with creating the new official division between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Through incompetence, dereliction of duty and sheer perversity, the border ends up running through the middle of the small town of Puckoon.
Houses are divided from outhouses, husbands separated from wives, bars are cut off from their patrons, churches sundered from graveyards. And in the middle of it all is poor Dan Milligan, our feckless protagonist, who is taunted and manipulated by everyone (including the sadistic author) to try and make some sense of this mess . . .
'Bursts at the seams with superb comic characters involved in unbelievably likely troubles on the Irish border' - Observer
'Pops with the erratic brilliance of a careless match in a box of fireworks' - Daily Mail
'Our first comic philosopher' - Eddie Izzard
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Puckoon is in DAVID BOWIE'S TOP 100 BOOKS list
If you don’t do Twitter (where you can respond to Duncan directly), feel free to leave your thoughts about Puckoon in the comments section on FaceBook.
FOOTNOTE: For those who may have already read Puckoon, perhaps you’re not familiar with Spike’s very own spoken word version of the novel. Listen here.
#BowieBookClub #ReadingIsBrainFood