When his novel is stolen by a celebrity author Archie Lees embarks on a helter-skelter odyssey, seeking justice in the dark worlds of Anglo-American publishing, the tale swinging from London to Barcelona, New York, Aigues-Mortes and back again over twelves months, November 2003 to October 2004.
Lew Collins ransacks categories, voices and genres excavating plagiarism and influence, reanimating modernism, realism, magic realism, poetry, pop, drama, screenwriting and the postmodernist novel, defrocking the methods and madness of major and minor literary techniques and reputations in a century of writerly solitude.
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Reviews
”The most original book I read this year – utterly compelling postmodernism… inventive, imaginative, and inspiring…It is a unique publication….Uncorrected Proof is a postmodern novel that entertainingly riffs on form, style, character, tense, person – but with an overall thriller/quest type plot appropriation, it folds you into its delicious bizarro metascapes and humorous oft-satirical, oft-homagical visions, incorporating stylistic elements of hard-boiled fiction, screenplays, cookbooks, metafiction, the spy novel, cyberpunk, the literary novel, A Clockwork Orange, Gaelic, intertextuality, memoir and so much more in a book that self-consciously satirises the entire book and publishing industry – authors, editors, publishers – literary celebrity, literary delusions, literary snobbery, literary stupidity.’ Angela Meyer, LiteraryMinded
Using The Iliad as a starting reference point (in a deliberate cracked mirror image to Joyce’s use of The Odyssey in Ulysses), the novel playfully winks at Homer not so much for his epic poem’s style as for its archetypal tale of love, abduction and revenge. The characters all are sly doppelgangers for their Greek counterparts; Archie Lee for Achilles; Ellen Spartan for Helen; Menny Lowes for Menelaus and so on. But the book does not rely solely on post-modern mimicry or clever homage to keep our interest. It more than holds it’s own as a thoroughly enjoyable pulp story about stolen manuscripts and deferred vengeance in the volatile, cutthroat world of publishing. Paul Duran, Pacific Rim Review of Books
‘Quixotic, playful, a very deft pen…the ultimate postmodern novel is the interface of everything..where we are pointed with joy and aplomb.’ Eckhard Gerdes, Journal of Experimental Fiction
It reads like a splendidly maintained & protracted metafictional elaboration of the climactic shoot-out in the fun-fair corridor of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles’s ‘Lady from Shanghai’. I was glad to see refs. to ‘King of Comedy’, surely one of the last century’s vy best films. Tom Gibbons, Painter and author
This is a very brave new world you have stepped into, or invented, a new realm Eric Willmot, Author of Pemulwuy and Below the Line
I found your book very refreshing…very readable but also so postmodern and referential. I delighted in your sources.. Richard Olafson, Editor, Pacific Rim Review
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