The Punk Rock Birdwatching Membership
By Richard Foster
Printed by Orca Press 14th February 2025
Studying Richard Foster’s newest novel The Punk Rock Birdwatching Membership, a group of tales situated within the Duin-en Bollenstreek (Dunes and Bulb Area) within the west of The Netherlands, it’s troublesome to disregard the host of Bruegelesque animations and set-pieces he breathes to life.
The British-born, Netherlands-based Foster has made a profession out of astute and esoteric music criticism, with a method that makes snug bedfellows of custom, honesty, and weirdness; the written equal of an aspergillum full of heat LSD. In his 2022 debut novel Flower Manufacturing facility, additionally printed by Ortac Press, Foster’s freshly arrived protagonist meditated on the European ghosts of the previous and people on the horizon that washed over the continent because the millennium approached. Consternations marching to the identical location – however from completely different occasions. It bred the uncomfortable feeling that mythologies of the previous and mythologies of the long run are one and the identical.
Like his debut, The Punk Rock Birdwatching Membership is loosely anchored within the lethargic seasonal warehouse employment of the area’s tulip factories the place the protagonist works – however this time around the narrator seems extra built-in and settled inside the very exact intricacies of Dutch tradition. This time set on the opposite facet of the millennium, a number of the younger man nervousness is traded for older man appeasement, with arguments over what’s on the radio traded-in for jovial visits to the in-laws. The central stress inside the wider novel (if one is to deal with each novels as intrinsically linked, or even perhaps as a diptych) is that Foster’s set of characters keep in mind the previous as a halcyon time stuffed with bustling cafès, values, and wealthy characters. An air of forgetfulness pervades the prose of reminiscence, though the concerns and revelations feared for in Flower Manufacturing facility are very a lot current right here in The Punk Rock Birdwatching Membership, together with The Netherlands personal continued lunge to the far-right.
The subtly and expertise of Foster’s pen signifies that what seems on its floor as an autofictive middle-aged bildungsroman runs far deeper, tapping into the murkiness of societal and particular person psychology that examines how issues each seemingly change and perpetually keep the identical. It’s a sly experimental system that treads in the identical areas as Sixties experimental British author B.S. Johnson, who used the physicality of the e-book to reveal the vapidity of reminiscence, by chopping out holes in pages or by placing all chapters of a novel free right into a field and leaving it as much as the reader to decide on which chapter to learn subsequent.
The lasting sensation, after a remaining burst of fireplace within the e-book’s penultimate chapter, is that of Sixteenth-century Netherlandish painter Pieter Breughel, who, like Foster, tapped into the mythological muddle of the nationwide dream. Particularly, Breughel’s portray of The Land of Cockneye, a fabled Utopia the place “medieval peasant’s dream, providing reduction from backbreaking labour and the day by day wrestle for meagre meals” involves thoughts. In The Punk Rock Birdwatching Membership, we’ve got one thing of a century twenty first equal, a captivating, caustic e-book that like T.S. Eliot penned in his 1920 poem Gerontion, “hast nor youth nor age / however because it have been an after dinner sleep/dreaming of each”.
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Phrases by Robert Davidson
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