Pleasure Beach by Helen Palmer

When you’re depressed and when nothing matters, literature matters more.

When life feels like something that you’re no longer a part of, when there’s nothing about your days or weeks or months that feels worth exiting the mysterious and sometimes nightmarish, sometimes heavenly, dreaming hours, literature matters more.

When you yearn to be distracted (and remember when you used to be distracting), when every moment without successful forgetting of the present leaves you crying and hyperventilating in a psychological hole, literature matters more.

And that’s why sometimes you read books you know will be mediocre, that’s why you avoid occasional joys, because crashing back down is a fucking horrorshow. That’s why you switch off, because no pleasure really cancels out the tedium, so you just fucking stick with nothing, denying the self even the fleeting joys of literature because you feel like you don’t deserve it, that you don’t appreciate it right, that it’s not for you. When literature matters more, you find yourself reading it less. You idiot. You idiot. You fool. You fucking self-sabotaging prick.

When there is literature like Pleasure Beach, when there is such joy and pleasure to be found in prose and the narratives and characters it can be used to construct, of course literature fucking matters.

You could probably write a thousand reasons why Pleasure Beach is a masterpiece – its engagement with and arguable superseding of the literary canon; its moving depiction of a romance; its rare and non-sensationalist evocation of a scuzzy party 1990s Blackpool; its subtle political commentary; its complexity in terms of structure and composition; its rich characterful characterisation; its wit and humour; its playfulness; its power; its potency; its lyricism, its its its

It’s a fucking masterpiece.

Part contemporary riff on Ulysses, part retro 1990s queer romance, part elegy for lost futures and imaginary pasts, part lucid dream, part LSD travelogue, part fucking perfect fucking perfect fucking perfect novel.

It’s stream of consciousness, it’s poetry, it’s lush trad prose, it’s funny, it’s serious, it’s silly, it’s intellectual and maybe I wish more of it was simpler because you actually have to concentrate when you’re reading it and concentrating – thinking – is something I try to avoid because that’s just a little too close to real feelings and those are-

If you like literature, as in if you genuinely like literature and I don’t mean you “like books”, then this is something I cannot emphasise enough how important and valid and joyous this is.

It is youth and it is intellect, it is art and the mind, it is the body and joy, reality and regret.

It’s a fucking flawless fucking perfect example of a novel and there’s not much more to say than that.

It’s one of my best reads of the year. And literally all I do is reading and/or crying.

Buy it fucking now, yeah, via this link