Endland (sic) is not a country – or a book – for the faint-hearted. Readers would be well advised to gird their loins before tackling its short stories, packed full as they are with violence, porn, murder, poverty, grief, decay, drugs, despair, radioactive rain, depression, war and death. Each story is a fable seen through a dystopian lens and narrated in a broken, distorted (and poorly spelt) way that cleverly reflects the societal, political and familial breakdown being exposed. Brutal and hard-hitting on their own, when read as a collection these tales pack a punch that it is hard to recover from. Even Jarvis Cocker in his introduction writes: ‘I respect this book – but I never want to read it again.’
And yet Endland is also laugh-out-loud funny, with a twisted, surreal, black humour worthy of a Monty Python of the Dark Side. From Fred and Rosie West as game-show hosts to a corporate sponsorship deal resulting in Ground Xerox©, Tim Etchells’ use and abuse of cultural references is both surprising and artful – and bang on the money.
