In Endland, Tim Etchells 'finds humor in post-Brexit Britain'

Abandon all soap, ye who enter here; you won’t stay clean in “Endland.” A squalidly funny collection of short stories set in the ruined fairground of Brexit Britain, these “postcards from hell” present parochial filth as mock epic.  Endland, not England? “It is a well known fact,” Etchells writes, “that there are more snakes than ladders in the great game of life.” Video: Brexit briefing: 227 days until the end of the transition period (Press Association) The text is garnished liberally with “sic”s and symbols, typos and solecisms, spellings inconsistent and incoherent. Gallery: 4 books Bill and Melinda Gates recommend to help you be less stressed (Business Insider) Accepting the 2016 Ibsen Award on behalf of Forced Entertainment, Etchells said the decision for his company to move north, rather than focus on London’s more obvious attractions, “came from an understanding that innovation and change do not need to come from any idea of a centre, that the periphery has its strength, and that there might be a freedom, there, in that neglectedspace in which experiment could thrive.” “Endland” is a natural product of this decision. Its florid colloquialisms and anarchic narrative forms serve to shed light on other neglected spaces — the lives of Britain’s forgotten working class. In an endnote, hedescribes a core method as offering “vivid minimal information which invites or obliges the reader to build fiction.” This seems right: The gaps in his surreal fables are thedarkinterstices in which new sympathies may fester.

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