The Solex Brothers (Redux)

Synopsis

Like a toboggan of wolves who have eaten their driver, The Solex Brothers rushes blindly through the forest, drawing on the tropes and archetypes of folk tales, parables, political manifestos, philosophical tracts and grammar. Unlike a toboggan of wolves, The Solex Brothers explores the fate of the individual – albeit a rather feeble individual – and of personal responsibility in a culture of absurd, inexorable forces. Farce navigating towards moral absolution in narratives at once Fauvist and Baroque, expunging the twee with a reformist's remorseless vigour; cherishing its influences with a poststructuralist’s vertical rigour; and, at times, chasing its tail with a schoolboy’s reductive snigger. Like a toboggan of wolves who are beginning to regret having set-upon and eaten their driver, the world of “The Solex Brothers” is funny, sad and irretrievably lost

Reviews of this Book

‘Kennard’s imaginative range is constantly awe-inspiring, coupling as it does seeming absurdities with healthy doses of down-to-earthiness to concoct, well, I don’t care to try to name what it concocts, because to name it would spoil my day. Reading “The Esplanade”, which concerns a spy and an assassin, sort of, it occurred to me somewhat belatedly that the voice behind these, um, things (the narrator? Well, maybe) is consistent. It belongs to a participant in what’s going on, someone who is a part of things but somehow adrift, at times very switched on and self-assured, at other times bemused and something of a spectator.’ —Martin Stannard

‘The Solex Brothers struck me as probably the most interesting debut of 2005 ... original and startlingly imaginative lyrical pyrotechnics.’ —Nathan Thompson

‘He is a talent to watch out for. He's got it. Let's hope he doesn't lose it, either to the world of performance cliché or the mainstream's emasculating embrace.’ —Tim Allen