Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany
Uwe Schütte
Penguin Press, £9.99
A book on Kraftwerk is bound to be difficult: there’s the group’s long established secretiveness and happy detachment from the music world (stories of their unanswered Kling Klang studio telephone persist); so new material will be scarce. Chances of a scoop? Zero. Then there’s the danger of coming across as a pseud. Schütte states he did not want to write about the band or the stories; so why bother? Instead he wanted to focus on Kraftwerk as a “cultural phenomenon”. But in the end he sort of does both, and in falling between these stools he fails to satisfy on either level. Much of the writing, when not stating the obvious, often strays into research-paper territory too, which doesn’t help. Kraftwerkers will be better served elsewhere.
Low
Jeet Thayil
Faber & Faber, £14.99
Dominic Ullis is sitting on a plane clutching a white plastic box containing his wife’s ashes at the beginning of Jeet Thayil’s latest novel, Low. He’s about to touch down in the “lovely slum city” of Bombay which will act as the frenetic and hallucinatory proscenium to Ullis’s drug-fuelled grief-bender. A problem that often befalls wild and grungy drug novels is that the characters can seem to be having a far better time than the reader. So by the time Thayil’s main character once again comments on the girth of the line before him, the reader cannot help but feel like the wallflower at the orgy. Ullis’ weekend in Bombay reflects the novel itself – a somewhat messy journey that often loses its track.
Protestant Nationalists in Ireland, 1900-1923
Conor Morrissey
Cambridge, £75
“Protestant nationalism was a complex, vibrant counterculture in Ireland during the period 1900-1923”, depending as much on cultural influences as on political, according to Conor Morrissey. It was in Dublin and the northeast, where Protestants were most numerous, that it emerged. The three main themes examined are its motivation, its extent/influence and “the fraught relationship between religious identity and Irish nationalism”. The book’s approach is broadly chronological and looks at radicals in the South, dissidents in the North, converts from unionism, militants who became involved in the 1916 Rising and the complexities of Protestant nationalist involvement in the final phase of the independence struggle. The text skilfully shows the vibrancy and talent in Protestant nationalism; “however, its ambitions were too great and its adherents too few to achieve its ultimate aims”.
