A selection of reviews of Red Army Faction Blues.
‘[Ada Wilson's] aim in this beautifully-written novel is to write about rock music in the same way that David Peace wrote about football in The Damned United, as a mirror of contemporary history, as a glass through which to view the world. This multilayered realism, achieved through placing actual people and places under fiction’s microscope, certainly underlines the novel’s contemporary echoes of unrest, surveillance and a sense that things are getting a little out-of-hand politically and culturally and nobodyquite knows what’s going on. Ring any bells?’
– Ian McMillan – Yorkshire Post
‘This is a magnificent, messy book. Or rather it is a magnificent book about the messy degeneration of high ideals and good music. Skilfully and almost breathlessly, the author reveals the confused interior life of Peter Urbach, the undercover agent, as well as that of ex-Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green.’
– Paul Simon, Morning Star
‘Wilson has created here a place where worlds collide, firstly the worlds of the Red Army Faction of German terrorists in the 1960s and the world of the excesses of pop music in the same period, and then the world of fiction and history. While this fusion takes some work on the part of the reader, ultimately it is a revealing and entertaining exploration of both dimensions.’
– Andy Lancaster – The Bookbag
‘Shows the power of the novel to illuminate a moment in history; the moment when terrorism became the new rock ’n’ roll, the paths that took us there and the paths we have taken since.’
– David Peace
‘This fascinating and haunting work of ‘faction’ (pun intended) takes us into the violent world of left-wing terrorism in the dying embers of the late 60s/early 70s – the peace and love generation. A period in culture which would fuse together the seeming intellectual disparity between something as high minded as radical politics and something as lowbrow as rock music. Bombs and acid. They’ll blow your mind.’
– Barry Snaith
