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When encountering the works of Richard Makin, an urgent question is raised: How does one actually read this? One of the first sentences in the book is: ‘Word order is an allusive presence, a residue.’ In order to understand this linguistic residue, one has to alter one’s perceptions about how narrative operates. Work, like Makin’s other works, is allusive, elusive, solipsistic, and playful. Offering no anchor to the reader - a linear story, identifiable characters - instead, we are set adrift on a sea of words. Images and passages fade in and out, possible genres - science fiction, detective noir, autobiographical confessional - cling to the mind and then disappear just as easily. ‘I have inherited the magnetized corpse of an abandoned empire, ’ he says. This can be read as a passage from a speculative fiction novel or is Makin’s own assessment of the state of contemporary fiction. Work is fiction as a polysemic vehicle and mise en abyme. -The Driftless Area Review
One of the remarkable things about Richard Makin’s writings, and especially his latest book, Work, is how he manages to fashion a narrative from a thousand disparate fragments. Everyday situations warped by dream logic become almost encyclopaedic in scope. What he does with these situations is never humdrum. He invests his materials with a dramatic edge, foreshadowing dread, and provides a smattering of epiphanies, meanwhile indulging in numerous handbrake turns that disrupt the linear flow of events and suggest new narrative possibilities. Nothing in Work is quite what it seems at first glance - nor even a second. Makin has the sensibility of a poet, and as with the best poetry, the kind that requires and rewards close attention, not everything makes perfect sense - nor does it need to. Gloriously imperfect? That’s as good a description as any, one that in no way diminishes Work, which is, above all, a major aesthetic achievement. -Brian Marley
An unclassifiable encyclopedic novel whose leaves form part of a vast corpus that splices metafictional speculation with rebels and revolution, theory and arcana, witches and inquisition, science and magic, misfits and marine invertebrates with five or more radiating arms, set somewhere in a future dystopia which torques into a strangely familiar present where asymptomatics are shot on sight. There are echoes of Acker, of Beckett, of late Ballard, and of Lautreamont’s fin-de-siecle masterpiece Maldoror, but the sumptuous polyphonic mesh of language, register and fractured schizoid idiolects is uniquely Makin’s own. If you like your fiction to be totally wired, this is for you. -Philip Terry
Work is the alter-ego of Richard Makin: work as in hard toil in the engine room, work as in crafted memory, work as in magic spells, invocations. When I first engaged in this work, a most excellent standard of work, work of an obsessive nature, I was taken on a journey with no specific destination; I had to work within the interludes. As his journal states, this is thirsty work, ritual work, a mobile work of fire. I am amazed at his ability to remember, and list. Clearly familiar with the more radical techniques; the technique used is pneumatic parataxis. His job is to monitor the ebb tide. Work: there is no match. -James Davies
