re:mote voices

Title: Linger Awhile
Author: Russell Hoban
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Irving Goodman has fallen in love with Justine Trimble. Of course, 2 problems come to mind, he is 83-years-old, and she has been dead for the last 47-years. But Irving thinks he knows a man who can help, so armed with a video of Justine's film Last Exit To El Paso he goes to visit Istvan Fallok. Isolating the magnetised particles that represent Justine, mixing them with a suspension of disbelief and some primordial soup and they bring the film star back to life. However, it isn't bad enough that Istvan has decided he wants Justine for himself, but to make her full colour takes a little blood. Which of course leads to the first body and the involvement of the police...

Through his London based novels Hoban redefines a landscape. His text filled with references to places that exist - the Victoria & Albert and the London Underground cropping up in every novel. Mixed with places and people that pop up with enough regularity that you start to believe they exist. Istvan Fallok and his Hermes Soundways first appeared in The Medusa Frequency, cropping up again in Her Name Was Lola, to be given a featured role in Linger Awhile. The same is the case with Grace Kowalski who had an influence on events in Her Name Was Lola and comes back here with her All That Glisters store.

To a degree Hoban's novels are about men and women and their relationships, at the centre of each you will find at least one romance. Often their is something in particular about the woman, in this case every man who looks upon Justine becoming caught up in the obsession. As with the likes of The Medusa Frequency or Amaryllis Day And Night there can be something darker in the relationship, the fact that the woman at the core of Linger Awhile has been created Frankenstein style and has Dracula like hungers of course makes for a certain aspect of horror. As the book progresses there is more of that, people who encounter Justine experience a certain lingering sensation of something following them, something dark and hopping.

When Grant Morrison wrote the comic series The Invisibles he described it as being a work of magic, a spell cast and boosted by his readers. Hoban has always had an element of the odd to his work, though increasingly there seems to be an idea where people can do urban, contemporary magic. In Her Name Was Lola, the title character burnt a piece of music to CD, a piece of music designed to make her ex-boyfriend forget her. In Linger Awhile we have another example of this kind of concept with the bringing to life of Justine Trimble, an image brought forward from a video cassette. There is something strange about this novel, Linger Awhile is so uncannily spot on, so clever and witty, so seductive, that I suspect that Hoban has cast a spell. An odd kind of conjuring that affects your mind as you read it, so that you end the book with a Hobanic view of the world lurking like a dark hopping thing in your head.