Kinch

Articulate, finely structured, deftly paced and subversively original, Kinch is an intellectual white-knuckle ride. Set in a time which is now or any time, in a place which is England or anywhere, and against a backdrop of barbaric extremes of religio-political corruption, 14-year-old Kinch and his associates, Pigeon and Brownie, each try to salvage coherence and integrity from the moral chaos that surrounds them. Kinch is a fantasist, romantically obsessed with avenging the murder of his anarchist father; Pigeon is an insecure literate naïf of unknown parentage, and Brownie an itinerant actor and frustrated poet now in the pay of the religio-political hierarchy as an informer. Taking place in and around the walled cathedral city of Axton, the story charts the adventures of its three main characters over a seven-day period. As we follow them through their sub-universe of violence, farce and melodrama, our own ideas of cognition, motive and memory are teased apart to expose the redemptive epiphanies of the organic and material world. The form and distinctive appearance of the novel are resonant with the rhythms and cadences of painting and music, while the lyrical and darkly expressive text becomes in itself an agent for the very nature of perception.

Laurie Evan Owen’s childhood switched from a bombed-out Birmingham to a very rural Buckinghamshire. After grammar school and art school in Oxford, he studied painting at the Royal Academy and worked as an artist in London, before marrying, raising children, earning money as a house painter, writing, becoming a well-known community activist, retiring, divorcing and then moving to the Sussex coast.