“Its really pleasing to read a good Stewart Home book again in Tainted Love after the disappointment of the preceding 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and Down And Out In Shoreditch novels. 69.. was particularly galling for me in that it seemed that it was made up of a lot of reviews of other books which I’m not interested in, an awful lot of stuff about ley lines and stone circles with a garnish here and there of sex; only the horny ventriloquist dummy gave some relief. With Tainted Love he has produced a great book not by safely returning to the style and methods recognised as the foundations of his oeuvre as seen in the likes of Red London, Blow Job and Slow Death. Whereas those three great books kind of meld into one in my memory, Tainted love is fresh and stands alone. It is a fiction draped around a framework created from Home’s mother’s diaries. Taking at face value Home’s claims that his mother moved in circles of some legendary names in 1960s London, plus taking into account Home’s past work in hoax and post-situationist/”neoist” reality screwing, one can expect some iconoclastic treatment here (The Krays, John Lennon, Brian Jones and others do not come out of this looking pretty.) This doesn’t only undermine individuals but it also chips away at the nonsense of the 1960s being a time of great freedom and fun, finding instead the exploitaion and nihilism. With the central figure (first person in prose) being a female, Jilly, I think you can see through the BS of the whole free love thing of the 60s, that it was more free for some (men) than it was for others (women.) That’s probably how “free love” failed. ”
Bimbo wrote this review Tuesday, July 17, 2007.
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