Excerpt
With pub fighting, as in all the creative arts, it was crucial to avoid cliché. You had to come at it from strange angles and oblique perspectives. Your opening had to be strong and unexpected. Then, scene by scene, you had to make your point quickly and get the fuck out of there. In this last respect pub fighting was very much like the bitch Kennedy had betrayed the novel for. It was like screenwriting, where economy was king. (Chapter 1, p. 6)
They went to Le Orpheus in Beverly Hills, where Kennedy- a known tipper of preposterous magnitude- was greeted by the maître d in very much the manner of a priest welcoming Christ himself to a Sunday-morning service. And the comparison was apt for lunch was the closest thing Kennedy Marr had to church: a sacred institution, with its own arcane rituals that had to be observed. (Chapter 6, p. 39)
He wandered through to his bedroom where, thankfully, all signs of Saturday nights atrocity had been erased by the cleaners. Women they lived on their own and you had, what? Full fridges. Cleanliness. Paid bills. Fresh clothes neatly folded and stacked in drawers. Men? Unless you did what Kennedy did and threw money and staff at the situation you had chaos. Squalor. The rafts of T-shirts and pyjama bottoms stuffed down the back of the bed, gradually transitioning from bedwear to spunk rags to science experiments. Final demands and a radioactive carton of Chinese food sharing shelf space with a jar of mustard. If only, he reflected, and not for the first time, he could hire cleaners for his mind. Thats what his mind needed. Staff. (Chapter 12, p. 72)