The Cutting Room (Canons)

Product Information

If you are interested in the non-black and white, if you can let the obvious flaws in somebody's character roll and look beneath to find a true nature, you should enjoy this book. Instead, Welsh takes us on a tour of shady Glaswegian businesses and drug dealers, explores Rilke's casual approach to sexual partners, and encourages us to contemplate the deeper implications of the McKindless photos. It's got everything I enjoy in a bleak, embittered European crime novel, starting with a seedy but sophisticated gay auctioneer named Rilke — who manages to get himself involved in all sorts of shady and dangerous shenanigans.

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh – Canongate Books

Despite all that is going around her, Stevie Flint is convinced that her boyfriend’s death was not a result of the disease or any other natural cause. The lift juddered to a halt, I eased back the metal grille, the heavy outer door crashed open and there was Rose. She has also written three plays, an opera, edited volumes of prose and poetry, and contributed to journals and anthologies.

It’s not the typos that bother me – although they’re there – it’s the way that the novel’s mystery (about ‘snuff’ pornography) fails to mesh with its milieu and cast of characters. He is given the job on the condition that the auction be completed in a week's time and that he clear out the contents of an attic office personally. I am too long in the tooth to make predictions, but I would not be averse another instalment at all. Welsh meditates on the various possibilities: the photos could be faked, staged; they could be real, a living, breathing woman could have been killed for someone's entertainment and sexual gratification.

THE CUTTING ROOM by Louise Welsh ★★★ | Kara.Reviews THE CUTTING ROOM by Louise Welsh ★★★ | Kara.Reviews

The stained glass of the front door cast a red glow across the hallway, a staircase with an ornately carved mahogany banister was to our left, the parquet floor laid with thinning Turkish rugs; this family had been rich for a long time. That said, all of the Glaswegian dialect seemed stilted--I could have written it and I'm not Scottish. Stevie’s looks and job possibly explains why she is able to date Simon Sharkey, a flashy doctor who wants nothing but the finer things in life. When Miss McKindless tells Rilke to burn the books in the attic, he crosses his fingers and assures her that he will do the deed. Usually you get a feel for the person who used to live in the house you're clearing - little things, style, a mode of living.It's less successful when it gets self-consciously literary and chimes off Girodias or Foucault, or presents its tombstone chapter epigraphs to lend some clout.

The Cutting Room (novel) - Wikipedia

What follows is a compulsive journey of discovery, decadence, and deviousness, steered in part by Rilke's gay promiscuity and inquisitive nature. It is as if the action is happening slightly out of sync with everything; if you were to look over at the clock, the hands would be moving more slowly than you might expect.

I liked the fact that the protagonist was a gay man, something that you don't see often in this genre. His ramshackle investigations into her decades-old murder is an attempt to make amends; Rilke feels implicated somehow in the world that exploited and wasted the girl. He's on a desperate sniffing trail, sorting through shucked-off evidence in a city and a book that seem to be teeming with fetishists of all kinds.

Louise Welsh - Book Series In Order Louise Welsh - Book Series In Order

So squalid in places you half-expect the pages themselves to squelch, there nevertheless remains a winningly sardonic tone throughout.

I’m not sure what my bookshelves would tell someone, except that I have a wide range of interests, that some might say is unfocused. Commuters disappeared into the sudden mist, some reappearing on the other side, others taking the glowing caterpillar tunnel that leads beneath the river and disappearing from view. Obsessions play a fundamental role in The Cutting Room, both in the actions of the dead antagonist and in Rilke, the protagonist and auctioneer who stumbles across snuff photographs while processing an estate and begins to wonder if they are real.