Magpie Trap
The Magpie Trap: A Novel
The Magpie Trap adds a contemporary twist to the common narrative thread of 'honour amongst thieves.' It takes Chaucer's 'The Pardoner's Tale' and places it very much in a twenty-first century setting; Leeds, Northern England's new home of rampant capitalism.
Style
Stylistically, The Magpie Trap can be compared to the work of Paulo Coelho, for example, in the way that it looks at contemporary society through the looking-glass of fairy tale. But it also owes much to the writings of Ian Rankin, whose Crime Fiction allows him to look at the underbelly of the modern British city.
Morality in The Magpie Trap
The moral questions and social comment in the book are telling and unforgiving, as it explores the dilemma of educating people out of the rat run, and then putting them straight back into it at the end of university: into the cliched world of the young executive in the new urban splash of Leeds. We explore the seeming emptiness of their lives, apart from clubs, pubs, restaurants and casinos- the common denominator being alcohol.
Structure
With a word-count of around 96,000, The Magpie Trap is divided into eight books, which are, in turn, split into short, snappy chapters, each from differing perpectives. The shift in perspectives allows for a full appreciation of the motivation of each of the characters, as well as detailed studies of their reaction to the event; the heist.
Can you escape the Magpie Trap?
The Magpie Trap raises a number of important questions;
- Is lucre really filthy, or is it our need for it that is really the thing that stains us?
- Who sees our true selves? Who isn't putting on an act?
- How far can we determine the path of our lives? Is there such a thing as fate?
- How much responsibility do we, as individuals, have in changing the unsatisfactory aspects of modern living?
- Can we still have dreams, and, if so, how many of them hinge on having obscene amounts of money? And why is this the case? Can we be happy with money borne of corruption?
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... the writing of Alex Garland, Paul Auster, Dan Brown, according to A.J Kirby. The expected audience for the novel is therefore wide-ranging- it can be classified as both a crime novel and as a thriller. But it also offers the attentive reader much more; it is full of literary allusion and the kind of cultural sign-posts which locate it firmly in a modern British city. Like Ian Rankin's Edinburgh in his Rebus novels, The Magpie Trap turns the city into a character in its own right: here Leeds, an upwardly mobile city, clamours for attention on the contemporary literary map.
Find out more
For a full plot synopsis, visit the Blog page; http://www.andykirbythewriter.20m.com/cgi-bin/blog/view_post/200976 or contact A.J Kirby directly.