Product Description

For fifteen-year-old Martin, growing up in Slough, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, reggae music, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cut-throat Teds and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet - until he is beaten up and thrown in the Grand Union Canal with his best mate Smiles.Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian express after three years working in a Hong Kong bar, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with catastrophe.Fast forward to 2000, and Joe is sitting pretty - earning a living as a DJ, selling records and fight tickets. Life is sweet again - until a face from the past forces him to re-live that night in 1977 and deal with the fall-out.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79005 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In Human Punk, the coming-of-age tale of a Thames valley likely lad, John King yet again delivers an unflinching, frank insight into British male working-class culture. King's best-known previous novels, The Football Factory and England Away, centred on the brutal subject of soccer hooliganism--of the domestic and export variety.

The antihero of Human Punk is Joe Martin: poor white trash from the council estates of Slough. In the novel's first third, set at the "arse-end of the 70s", Joe is a teenage no-hoper into cheap booze and cheaper girls. He's also into the new punk music that has finally percolated down to the Middlesex hinterlands.

King captures Joe's humble yet never-to-be-forgotten adolescent excitements--"the tingle of the cider" and the "smell of Bev's perfume banging into me"--with such empathy and verve that, in its praise, you can't help sensing the autobiographer at work rather than the novelist.

Unfortunately, the following sections of the novel aren't as telling. First it flashes forward to the late 1980s, when Joe is a backpacker returning to Blighty, as the prodigal son, on the Trans-Siberian railway; then it moves on to glitzy New Labour London of the millennium, where Joe is a moneymaking DJ. Throughout it all Joe broods on a childhood incident when a friend was nearly drowned, and the solving of this "puzzle"--his pal's fate--is what provides the book with its denouement. However, these later sections fail to grip the reader as it is difficult to afford the older, harder Joe the same sympathy one gave his youthful incarnation, and without such identification the whole book lacks psychological Semtex.

Fans of King's bleak, staccato, first-person narratives will not be disappointed by his now familiar but explosive insights into the male psyche.--Sean Thomas

About the Author
John King is the author of many novels, including The Football Factory, Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk and White Trash.

Customer Reviews

Great start, good middle, poor end
It's a great shame that King allows this book to deteriorate so much in the last part, because the first two thirds are genuinely brilliant. The frustrated young teenagers on London's doorstep, desperate to take part in the late 1970s punk revolution are sketched to perfection.

Skip forward to that trans-Siberian train journey and King starting to lag, although the Moscow sequence is superb.

Skip forward to Britain in 2000 and King's completely lost his way. It doesn't matter that the main character and narrator, Joe, hasn't moved on or developed along some artificial character arc, but all the other characters have transformed into wood and speak with the same voice (Joe's). The pop culture references that placed the first part so firmly in the 1970s disappear, Joe is supposedly a DJ; he plays the Clash and Sex Pistols and 'some of the up-to-date stuff', whatever that may be.

Brought it all back
I saw Human Punk in a local book shop, I usually browse around and wait for something to jump out at me. On this occassion this did. And am I glad that it did. I moved to London in 1977, from Birmingham, and was for a better description, a Punk. John Kings book brought back so many memories and feelings, I was spooked at times. Split into three parts, the first, end of school days and the scene in and around Slough, is by far the most powerful. It really sums up what was happening at that time. The music, the politics, the day-to-day rumblings and speeding of life. I found a lot of what the 'hero' of the story, Joe, was thinking and doing rang bells way back in my mind. The second part, his journey back from the Far East to Slough, is one long train ride. And that is how it feels. With not much to do and plenty of time, Joe is forced to look back over his life and evaluate where he is, where he has come from and where and why he is returning. Part three is smack bang up to date - year 2000. Back in Slough and more worldly wise, we pick up the pieces of the other two parts. And yet again it rings so true. The sub-culture, again the music and political reflections. I haven't finished it yet so can't comment on how it will all come together. But if you want a great read buy this book. Buy two, because if you lend it out you won't be getting it back.

Starts very well but tails off substantially.
The bits of this book about the young lad growing up in the late seventies are very good and evoke the feel of that era well. However, King is not so accurate in his depiction of the eighties and year 2000 and the story and storytelling reflect this. There is little of interest in the last third of the book and the writing becomes very flat - as if the writer himself knows he's finished the exciting parts he wanted to write about. My biggest gripe was that towards the end I found that all the people in the book by the end it was hard to distinguish between the characters because King had stopped giving them their own identities and ways of expressing themselves and made them cliched two dimensional half people devoid of much interest. This is sad because the book is probably just about worth a read for the first third alone.