Jonathan Martin

<p>In this novel <em>Jonathan Martin</em> Ansgar Allen resurrects the incendiary life of the 19th-century outsider who in 1829 set fire to York Minster. Martin's life - at once prophetic deranged and tragically emblematic of his age - becomes the ground for Allen's boldest experiment in historical fiction to date. Blending archival fragments self-published pamphlets trial records and fictionalised reconstructions <em>Jonathan Martin</em> asks: was Martin a prophet or a lunatic an arsonist or a visionary? Allen's prose at turns Joycean Woolfian and Beckettian inhabits Martin's fractured language and his millenarian visions bringing to life a world teetering between religious ecstasy madness and political upheaval. Structured in fragments that echo Martin's broken language and visions the novel interlaces biography dream trial record and philosophical meditation. Martin's story collides with those of his siblings - William the Philosophical Conqueror of All Nations John the Artist Richard the Poet-Quartermaster - each of whom embodies another skewed path of enlightenment or ruin. At the centre stands Jonathan: incendiary prophet lunatic. A powerful meditation on authorial voice writing as prophecy and the boundaries between sanity and inspiration <em>Jonathan Martin</em> continues Allen's exploration of education deviance and social order. It is a work of fiction that refuses to perpetuate the illusion of coherence confronting the reader instead with the broken totality of a life lived on the edge of destruction. </p><p></p><p>Ansgar Allen's new novel tableaus a life in fragments exhibiting-by way of public dissection-a relentlessly detached and digressive sequence of blunt dry unflinching incisions into the heart of bleakness. Undeniably blackly comic <em>Jonathan Martin</em> metafictionally nods to Tristram Shandy and B.S. Johnson mocking the absurdity of the one-POV historic novel and our own needs for the impossible mythological truth.-<strong>Vik Shirley</strong></p><p></p><p>This book is an act of negation it tells us what literature is by telling us what it is not what it can't do and what it won't. It is appositely negative-theological it is also an act of arson of a sort.-<strong>Steve Hanson</strong></p><p></p><p><em>Jonathan Martin</em> does not offer a linear tale of madness but a polyphonic reconstruction where voices collide and history itself burns. Allen's prose inhabits Martin's broken language and visionary fury producing a narrative that is as unsettling as it is hypnotic. At once historical fiction philosophical meditation and radical experiment <em>Jonathan Martin</em> is a novel of fire and prophecy of derangement and divine vengeance that confronts the reader with the instability of reason and the dangerous allure of belief.-<strong>David Vichnar</strong></p>