The Ruins

The Ruins reads like Raymond Chandler remixed by James Lasdun: barbed apercus and killer images flare across each page, even as unsettling elements moil below, in pursuit of more sinister ambitions. Every great noir tale is at some level a fantasia on the slipperiness of identity; Osman has written a great noir tale. The Ruins is an intriguing and beautifully-written tale of two brothers, filled with music and danger. But at its heart this is a novel about being restless and lonely; about how the inability to create something transient leads to a silent despair and the desire to be someone else. Oozes quiet sedition. There's a touch of Pynchon in this complex, woozily dream-like novel about music, mystery and imagined worlds... The Ruins is such a brilliant and idiosyncratic thing. It's hectic, soulful, elegant, and wickedly clever. It somehow approximates the immersive experience of listening to a life-changing album, and it also has some of the best line-by-line prose I've read in a really long time. The debut from Suede founding member and bassist Mat Osman is an altered state of a novel, mixing the crime of LA noir, the ambient cityscapes of JG Ballard and dark language games of Thomas Pynchon, all imbued with a sensitivity to the magical - and powerful - properties of making and listening to music. Fantastic debut novel. Magical, surreal, disturbing. Reminded me in places of early Iain Banks and DBC Pierre. Redolent of The Talented Mr Ripley, Performance and Theodore Roszak's Flicker, spanning London, LA and Las Vegas, The Ruins by Suede guitarist Mat Osman contains multitudes; it has all the makings of a cult classic.