{"id":1923,"date":"2014-12-22T13:13:35","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T13:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1923"},"modified":"2014-12-22T13:13:35","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T13:13:35","slug":"review-a-modern-don-juan-by-andy-croftn-s-thompson-ed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/2014\/12\/22\/review-a-modern-don-juan-by-andy-croftn-s-thompson-ed\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: A Modern Don Juan by\u00a0Andy Croft\/N.S Thompson (Ed)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"moderndonjuan3\"<\/a>Tales of the fictional libertine Don Juan have been told many times and date as far back as the 1630s with Tirso de Molina\u2019s play\u00a0The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest<\/em>. Over generations he has transformed into the hero-villain of countless plays, novels, poems and, of course, Mozart\u2019s opera\u00a0Don Giovanni<\/em>\u00a0(1787). But it is Lord Byron\u2019s epic satirical poem (1819-24) that has become most synonymous with the exploits of the legendary lothario. In this latest outing, 15 poets, including T.S Eliot prize winners George Szirtes and Sin\u00e9ad Morrissey, give the tale a thoroughly modern setting, as skunk-puffing night-club DJ Donald Johnson stumbles from one romantic disaster to the next in a \u201cdrunk arcadia\u201d. Along the way \u2018Donny\u2019 is transformed into everything from a Brussels Eurocrat to a reality TV celeb. His travels take him on a swanky yacht, into prison and most surreally, into outer space. When he heads into Europe he finds the Greeks need help with austerity rather than independence, though this is nothing compared to the pain he receives from a \u2018holistic\u2019 dentist\u2026<\/p>\n

Co-editor of the collection, Andy Croft, brings Donny into the \u2018unheroic age\u2019 where celebrities are fodder for the unforgiving gossip pages of tabloids, and fame is as transient as ever: \u2018how quickly reputations all unravel,\/From Cameron and Clegg to Jimmy Saville.\u2019 He discusses our obsession with superheroes and warns that to understand the world of economics you need more \u2018than someone in a mask from Marvel Comics\u2019. This humour is brutally contrasted with social commentary on modern warfare, where returning soldiers face a very different battle as they adjust back to \u2018normal life: \u2018\u2018but there\u2019s now twice as many in the can\/ As there are serving in Afghanistan\u2019.<\/p>\n

They say you shouldn\u2019t judge a book by its cover but in this case you can. It\u2019s a beautiful illustration by Martin Rowson that sees Byron\u2019s ancestral home of Newstead Abbey replaced with a metropolitan cityscape and, of course, he\u2019s on his mobile phone, no doubt lining up local conquests on Tinder. But it\u2019s more relevant to judge a book by its readers. Five Leaves, the publisher, offered the book first \u2018on subscription\u2019, harking back to the way books were often sold in Byron\u2019s time, demonstrating that there are many people out there who were eager to see this hapless seducer have one more outing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a314.99, Five Leaves<\/a><\/p>\n

This review was originally published in the Morning Star<\/a>\u00a0on 20 December 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

See Andy Croft’s poem about ‘Byron Clough’ in issue 5 of Dawn of the Unread<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tales of the fictional libertine Don Juan have been told many times and date as far back as the 1630s with Tirso de Molina\u2019s play\u00a0The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest. Over generations he has transformed into the hero-villain … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[290,437,438],"class_list":["post-1923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reader","tag-andy-croft","tag-don-juan","tag-lord-byron"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1925,"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions\/1925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameskwalker.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}