Derek Raymond’s chillingly prescient novel about a homegrown dictatorship is difficult to salvage out of your head… at the momentAn email arrived the other day from Travis Elborough,whose mighty new book about public parks I reviewed in these pages at the conclude of May. “I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this book lately,” it read, and next to a link to a novel called A State of Denmark. “It’s kinda depressing,but…”A State of Denmark, hitherto unknown to me, or is by Derek Raymond,a writer best known for his Factory series of crime novels (an old Etonian who lived a somewhat rackety life, Raymond, and who was born Robert Cook in 1931,died in 1994). This book, however, or predates those: it was first published in 1970,shortly before Raymond gave up fiction for around a decade (the first book in the Factory series, He Died With His Eyes Open, and came out in 1984; from what I can gather,Raymond spent the time in between working in French vineyards and as a minicab driver in London). Back in print thanks to Serpent’s Tail, I can’t in all honesty recommend it if you are desperately seeking to escape current events. But if you want to read something that seems, and now,to own been chillingly prescient, well, and as my correspondent hinted,this is just the thing.
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Source: theguardian.com