Martyn Pig Lucas And Kissing The Rain Essay

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After Kevin Brooks's three earlier books, Martyn Pig, Lucas and Kissing the Rain, readers will expect great things of Candy: a story as sharp as the title is sweet, with something dark lurking inside and no cosy answers. They will not be disappointed. Candy, the book, concerns lack of control. Candy, the character, has none. A heroin-addicted prostitute, utterly dependent on the terrifying pimp who supplies her drugs, she totters into toilets for regular fixes. She is beautiful, bright and sparky, but wrecked. Joe falls crazily in love with her, and love removes any control he might have had, hooking him into the ugly detritus of a drug-addict's world. Mind you, Joe had little control over his life before, and he constantly feels propelled by circumstances. In classical tragedy, a weakness in the central character inexorably drives the cartwheel of doom. In Candy, things are driven partly by events, or by forces stronger than Joe or Candy. Unusually…show more content…
He is intriguingly different, and his introspection allows us unusually deep into his mind. I initially doubted if a 15-year-old boy would ruffle his 20-year-old sister's hair and refer to her as "a beautiful young woman who meant everything to me", but Joe's exceptional decency eventually persuaded me that he might. After all, Joe says that although his father is "bigoted and blind and stupid", he "couldn't hold that against him". I would have done, but Joe, being exceptionally decent, couldn't. Brooks's use of language is adept. He is a wordsmith as well as a storyteller: Iggy has "passionless eyes", which have a "sterile light"; Joe's heightened senses after a particularly shocking scene are perfectly depicted by the quiet intensity of "the darkness shifting in the rustle of the shadows" and "the cold night air ... misted with the smells of the city". Exactly the right amount of controlled description floats a powerful plot to a more vivid, multisensory

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