Communion Town

July 22, 2013
Sam Thompson’s debut, a novel of stories set in enigmatic Communion Town, landed a coveted spot on the Man Booker longlist. Like David Mitchell and Italo Calvino, Thompson has some fun trying out literary styles. One chapter is written as a noir-ish caper, another as a futuristic romance, another follows a serial killer, and there’s even a lovely childhood fable with notes of magical realism. The cumulative effect is of a world simultaneously revealed and obscured: just when you’ve gotten a grip on Communion Town, it’s transformed. Thompson’s sentences are graceful enough that he mostly pulls off these crafty fireworks—at least when it comes to miming a style. But too often, exhilarating sentences (like one describing the sea as “full of the movements of an anticipatory audience, rustling programs, shushing itself...”) are buried in descriptive layers that deaden an entire page. In the opening story, a dramatic event is obliquely mentioned over and over in the span of 20 pages. When the action is revealed, it hardly seems worth the wait. Thompson is a talented writer with a seemingly boundless interest in language and its potential; one can’t help but wish that he applied some of his energy to getting to the point.

July 1, 2013

Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Thompson's debut novel envisions an imaginary city, then portrays characters on its edges, from a lovesick folksinger to a slaughterhouse worker, in a variety of styles. A real brain twister that uses genre means for larger ends and should attract a broad range of readers.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2013
This debut by a British writer, touted as a novel, is in fact a collection of 10 linked stories, the link being an imaginary city. What kind of city? One that's fearful and divided against itself. In the title story, two young men, immigrants, are closely monitored after their arrival. The fear is that they might have dealings with the Cynics, vicious pranksters who terrorize commuters, or the so-called monsters, ostracized vagrants with hearts of gold. The class divisions are stark in "The Song of Serelight Fair." A poor rickshaw puller is taken in by a rich girl, who buys him a guitar and encourages his songwriting, all the while manipulating him. These are broad strokes. They establish a framework but little else. One story ("Three Translations") has a fascinating reference to a city ritual, a festival for its unmarried men, but fails to exploit it. There is also a boogeyman loose in the city's gritty neighborhoods. Sometimes he's a serial killer, as in "Good Slaughter," the collection's dramatic high point. Elsewhere, in "The Rose Tree" and "A Way to Leave," which rework the same material, he's a pitiful thing with a secret so terrible that, once heard, it will turn one into a zombie. Both stories lean heavily on innuendo, as does "Outside the Days," in which a young libertine, a contemporary Dorian Gray, falls into a pit of depravity. "I'd be more specific if I could," says the narrator lamely. Two others inhabit rarefied worlds with literary echoes. "Gallathea" turns the world of a private investigator inside out; it's served with a big dollop of Chandler, a splash of Burgess and a twist of classical mythology. In "The Significant City of Lazarus Glass," an investigator-turned-criminal mastermind battles four former colleagues; it's an elaborate spoof of Holmes-ian deductive techniques. A versatile writer struggles to find his voice in this scattershot collection.

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October 15, 2013
In his lyrical and suspenseful debut novel, English writer Thompson draws on horror, noir, and other genres to fashion the titular city through the eyes of 10 distinct inhabitants. A detective down on his luck scores a case that could make or break his career. A slaughterhouse worker witnesses a haunting murder that strains his relationship with his enigmatic boss. A caseworker recounts the struggles of his immigrant clients. Friends and strangers swap stories at a bar while one man ventures outside, where horrific things supposedly happen after dark. And a janitor-by-day and rickshaw-driver-by-night dates a folk musician who introduces him to the guitar, which becomes a new obsession that both changes his life and hinders their relationship. While no overarching plot weaves the characters' stories together, Communion Town serves as the real protagonist, a fully realized place that Thompsonwith often breathtaking prose and versatilitypeoples with cynics, dangerous wanderers, and lonely outcasts. A shadowy city saturated with life and lore, and held together by human struggles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)