Plot
Set against a soundtrack of Clash, Sex Pistols, X-Ray Spex, Ruts and Ramones records, sixteen-year-old Joe sets about enjoying his new-found freedom, which in the summer of ’77 means hard-drinking pubs and working-men’s clubs, local Teds, soulboys. disco girls and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. A joyride to Camden Town in North London takes him to see his first band, but it is a late-night incident back on the streets of Slough that changes his life forever.
The second part of the book takes place in 1988 and finds Joe in China, receiving bad news in a letter from home. He buys a black-market ticket and takes the Trans-Siberian Express back to England. During this journey he reflects on the events that have filled the intervening years, eventually returning to that night in 1977. Siberia passes in a series of recollections and romance with a Russian woman, Joe arriving in Moscow during the days of Mikhail Gorbachev, continuing to Berlin where he crosses the Wall in the early hours. More trains take him on to Slough.
The third section of Human Punk captures the main characters as they reach middle-age. They are older, but little wiser. Slough has changed, but not too much, the spirit that drove Joe and his friends as boys stronger than ever. He makes his living in a range of ways, one of which involves the buying and selling of secondhand records. His punk beliefs remain solid. Life bounces along until a face from the past emerges from the haze of a misty morning and forces him to stop and confront his memories once more.
Read more about this topic: Human Punk
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)