4 thoughts on “Brown is the New Black – by David Rix”

  1. Pages 7 – 21
    “‘It’s using fake shadows,’ he said. ‘Breaking up the shape.'”
    A gradually involving scenario where you soon become camouflaged as a reader – from yourself, unaware perhaps you’re reading. This is a post-holocaust London scenario, beautifully, yet somehow sparely, evoked, the girl and boy couple failing to exploit black as their own camouflage from the slightly or potentially aggressive (so far) hunters and the noble naked wanderers… moths, bones etc., all seems naturally to fall into this genius-loci of situation and place. Even the potential provision of electricity, that I questioned about to myself earlier, but perhaps I couldn’t find myself to ask. So, it is good to break off as part of a real-time review, to think of these things. Like also asking why scissors are not mentioned when the girl starts making clothes from fabrics in various shades of brown, designs without a belt line etc., as what now seems to be an alarmingly efficient camouflage.
    A delightfully oblique conjuration of an obliquity of dress.
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  2. Pages 21 – 40
    img_2507“It is hard to grasp how high railway platforms are until you are on the tracks below them.”
    …like looking up from between the lines of this text, looking at its slowly revealing meaning of how the world used to be before these railways became derelict and open to a walking (or even biking?) improvisation. The couple, sexually aware as well as naive, when parading sometimes half-naked, half-camouflaged, as the girl does, in front of the tall and noble slow-motion real-time fully naked wanderers, with, also, a brush against a hunter and his gun, and a brush against art in bookish and painterly form, while missing music amid the silence. This is a hypnotic journey, half mindless, half deliberate, a sleight of mind that prestidigitates the ‘group consciousness’ that at least this book contains as some sort of bridge between then and now. I have woken from the journey, having felt I dreamt it, not read it. And I mean that as a significant compliment.
    By tear, rip or meticulously unpicked seam, a flash of flesh shows that white is the new moon…
    end
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