Children Of The Sun gets under the skin of British neo-nazism

Fonte: http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/813699-children-of-the-sun-gets-under-the-skin-of-british-neo-nazism

Max Schaefer’s disquieting debut dives headlong into the murky world of British neo-nazism.

More provocatively, he centres on the homosexuality within the movement to craft a fascinating novel of contradictions.
Schaefer swaps between two distinct narrative strands. One follows gay skinhead Tony through the 1970s and 1980s.
The other, set in 2003, traces James, who is trying to write a screenplay about gay skins and becoming increasingly obsessed with his research.
The key (real-life) figure stalking both storylines is Nicky Crane, a rabid thug and leading light of the fascist movement, who came out on Channel 4 in the early 1990s and died of an Aids-related illness.
It transpired that Nicky, while bashing heads for the NF, had also been a regular at gay superclub Heaven, his image of hypermasculinity working to his advantage in both scenarios.
Schaefer’s lightly fictionalised account of events in the far right’s recent history wears his meticulous research a little heavily at times, although the delirious melding of reality and invention is striking: the text is punctuated by reproductions of real articles and documents.
James’s feverish attempts to disentangle the byzantine splits and alliances of the movement and investigate its gay and occult subtexts are occasionally bemusing.
But Schaefer creates a vivid sense of place, whether it’s the stink and adrenalin of a public toilet encounter or sharp tableaux from the 2003 anti-war march in London.
Modern-day dinner party postulating sits (intentionally) awkwardly against accounts of mob attacks on blacks and mosh pits at Skrewdriver gigs – but Children Of The Sun’s incongruities are often its greatest strength, throwing both storylines into unsettling relief.