Robinson | Granta

  • Published: 22/08/2001
  • ISBN: 9781862074637
  • 130x20mm
  • 204 pages

Robinson

Christopher Petit

Robinson is a persuader. He uses his voice to win and manipulate, and the narrator of this novel even now knows that if he were exposed to that voice again he would fall for Robinson’s charm. It led him into the night-world of Soho, of seedy pubs, sexual fantasies, upstairs rooms, violence and betrayal. But who exactly is Robinson and where else will his charms lead?

Voyeurism, alienation, wife-swapping (with your own wife), and a deus ex machina who transmigrates from Harry Lime into Fassbinder on Valium. Highly recommended

Iain Sinclair

The atmosphere, menacing, monochromatic and heavy, has all the brooding qualities of a film noir

The Times

This mesmerising novel has something very black to say about freedom and self-worth; it shows us monsters - pornography, drugs, technology - sapping the force of human wills. But there is also a self-monstering joy to be had amid the phantasmagoria: a perverse pleasure in losing oneself, a willful desensitisation of the will. The experience of reading the darker scenes in Robinson can do this to the reader too

Giles Foden, Times Literary Supplement

The Author

Christopher Petit is a novelist and film-maker. His work in film includes Radio On, Chinese Boxes and (with lain Sinclair) The Cardinal and the Corpse, The Falconer, Asylum and London Orbital. His first novel, Robinson, has been republished by Granta Books. He is also the author of The Psalm Killer and Back from the Dead. He lives in London.

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