Electric
Pastyland continues the story of Charlie Curnow, Alan Kent's aspiring Cornish
rock star. The previous novel, Proper Job Charlie Curnow, saw the rise and fall
of 'Balance', Charlie's band, and ends with Charlie back on the Trelawney estate,
bereft of group and girlfriend, but not beaten.
Pastyland
sees Charlie reforming the group as a Hendrix covers band, while at the same time
trying to keep his parents fragile marriage together, and adapt to the bewildering
social change of 21st century Cornwall.
Written entirely
in Cornish dialect, this novel portays another Cornwall, a place of run down estates,
drugs, and marital breakdown, where the inhabitants live in a state of resigned
nihilism.
The contemporary theme is reflected in Charlie's
Polish girlfriend, Yeugen, and his encounter with Trescothick, terrorist mastermind
and head of the Kernow Liberation Front.
The novel is both
authentic, and, in some places, disturbing, and many readers will find it hard
to equate the Cornwall of their summer holiday's with this dystopia. But it's
real, and if you want to know how the Cornish think, and talk, then read this
book.
In Charlie Curnow, Alan Kent has created a modern
Cornish literary hero, diffident yet ambitious, shackled to the past but looking
to the future, the man everyone relies on to put things right. Which he does,
even if he has to put himself in harms way.....
