The FT judges Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam by its cover:
This design for Alexander Trocchi’s existentialist thriller Young Adam is too dour for the classic pulp look perfected by Pan: the half-dressed woman, cowering before the raised fist or gun of a grimacing hoodlum. It is, however, most definitely illustrating a specific scene from the book. The worried-looking Cathie is about to end up in the grey waters of the Clyde canal, though quite how involved the leather-capped Joe – the book’s unreliable narrator – is in this incident forms the murky heart of the book.
Not that we notice the water, particularly, hidden as it is by the publisher’s blurb. It is the grim architecture of industrial Britain – the gasometer and factory chimney – that acts as counterpoint to the focus of the illustration, the girl’s face. The sickly lighting matches the traditional yellow of the Pan title block, and the face itself is a masterpiece in miniature. The ambivalence of Cathie’s expression carries the whole weight of the cover: too naturalistic to be true pulp crime, too menacing to be mere kitchen sink drama. It is our need to find out what she sees in Joe’s face that compels us to open the book.
Further: Return of the Outsider, a profile of Trocchi / The junky genius of Alexander Trocchi / Between the glittering mirage and the dust of reality: an appreciation of Young Adam
First posted: Saturday, May 17th, 2008.
Leave a comment:
