Product Description

Partially based on diaries kept by the author's mother, this kaleidoscopic view of 60s counterculture shows how the optimism of swinging London imploded into nihilism and drug addiction. Arriving in the Smoke at the age of sixteen in 1960m narrator Jilly O'Sullivan lands gainful emplyment as a high class hostess. Fresh out of school, Jilly joins the exclusive scene that was swinging before the rest of London. By the time of the hippie explosion she's not only mixing with slumlords, gangsters and black power activists, but narcophilic 'faces' like Alexander Trocchi, Brian Jones, Michael Reeves and John Lennon. When Jilly drops acid it's so that she might become a cosmonaut of inner space and, by 1965, heroin is her chosen method of coming down from LSD fuelled highs. Propelled through a world of Hindu gurus, Islamic mystics, bent coppers and decadent aristocrats, Jilly lives fast and knows everyone. From her grass-smoking and CND-supporting beatnik youth, through to her death at the end of the 70s, Jilly's story allergorises the fatal trajectory of London's flower children, who were reluctant to let go of hedonism even when the party was well and truly over.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78305 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From the Publisher
Independent on Sunday, November 6th, 2005

Stewart Home's filthy and gleefully iconoclastic new novel is framed as the miscellaneous unpublished papers and memoirs of Jilly O'Sullivan, a high-class hostess, hippie, activist, drug addict and face of the 1960s counterculture, posthumously discovered by the son she gave up for adoption. The device explains Home's discontinuous narrative ('the loose sheets on which my mother scrawled her autobiography were badly jumbled when they came into my hands') and allows him to jump from one celebrity-, sex- and drugs-filled episode to the next, without any dull bits of exposition in between. It gives an impression of verifiable authenticity to a vision of swinging London so completely riotous, debased and unlike the accepted version, that it would otherwise seem incredible. Apparently, Home's book is based on his own mother's diaries, but the cult novelist and cultural theorist is also something of a situationist hoaxer, and I don't think we can be certain. Jilly narrates her larger- than-life life with a mixture of cool detachment and wide-eyed zest that seems in keeping with a character who sold sex from a young age, but also took acid and expanded her consciousness with counterculture icons and Indian gurus. Whether arranging gay orgies for the Krays, acting as Patty Hearst to fulfil RD Laing's sex fantasies, or playing with and then injecting heroin into 'John Lennon's love muscle', she is both mischievous and listless. As if she'd anticipated, right from the start, the disillusionment and the hangover that was to come.

Customer Reviews

Boring
You have read better tales than this about the swinging London period. Rehashes a lot of old stories that have been better covered elsewhere. The R D Laing sections are frankly boring. Might float your boat but there are better books on this period out there.