Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1589370 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

Top notch, old chap
British Summertime is a remarkable read. There are a lot of "time travel changes the world as we know it" adventures out there, but Cornell's is certainly an original spin.

Brimming with his trademark leftie, hippy optimism and weird, horrific violence, the beautiful prose style masks the fact it's a hugely complicated, sprawling space opera. Dan Dare meets Judas Iscariot, and that's hardly the half of it.

As he's done before, Cornell throws a load of variously unhinged or unhappy characters into a cosy, recognisably English setting and then has progressively wild things rip up the scenery. Not one of the characters is safe. Every one of them's going to get hurt somehow.

Anything can happen and it does. Decapitated heads with Received Pronunciation accents pilot nippy spaceships in the intergalactic war against bits of tubing. A girl fluent in body language and human geography - able, inately, to find chip shops among streets she's never visited before - discovers her High Church, super-famous pop-star alter-ego. The master-of-disguise working for British Intelligence regulary drills holes into his own head.

It's Cornell's deft writing style and the genuine affection we have for the lead characters that enable him to get away with such insane, unliklely happenings. Less outlandishly blasphemous than last year's Something More, it explores many of the same topics and themes. British Summertime is wonderfully weird and unusual, continually suprising, often shocking and really good fun.

When's the next one out, Paul?

Defining Chipshopness
British Summertime is Paul Cornell's second novel to combine time, space and religion into a mainly coherent whole.
Alison dreams of watching the Crucifixion from Judas Iscariot's point of view; can find chip shops in a strange place; and has a friend who uncovers a deadly secret whilst working in a Peak District cave.
When a pilot from 2129 arrives in 2001 and meets Alison, both of their worlds are changed forever. We discover the meaning of Angels, the secret of the first Navigator and what a man's life is really worth.
Complex plotting, delightful wordplay and skillful narration, with enough hidden secrets to keep you guessing, this is an entertaining and enjoyable work.

If you've ever imagined more than the nine-to-five...
I recognise the styles of a number of contemporary writers here: Lesley Glaister; Clive Barker; (early) Joanne Harris; (late) Douglas Adams. But patches of Cornell are a shade darker than any of these, I think (not for kids, this, unfortunately) and he brings his own particular spin to things.

Cornell plants his feet in that slice of British culture who live split between the bright lights of the big city and the marvels of the natural world, and who are unafraid to imagine what could be on this crazy ball of rock we call home. From here he conjures a host of remarkable characters and dumps some of our more contemporary concerns on them.

This is remarkable stuff and a cracking read. It defies genre by drawing on several and beating them soundly into new and interesting shapes with cleaner lines. It's ambitious - but it knows it's ambitious. What is art unless it's daring now and then? Cornell's writing takes on some really difficult scenes head-on (I won't spoil them) and comes out largely unscathed. Wish I could write like that.