The Magnificent Wurlitzer

The Magnificent Wurlitzer is a modern epic, its theme that of the 'guilty Faust' on a fantastic, grotesque journey seeking his truth, his Mephistopheles. Its hero James (aka Jay, Jayman, Hopper) treads in the traces of epics from East and West, Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, G tterd mmerung, from jazzman to shaman, sliding from music and religion to seeking order where there can be none, to politicking and leadership of the virtual and the voiceless.

Wurlitzer is the machine that plays all music in its own sweet way. It is creation, innovation, improvisation - a farrago-medley of beauty and bad taste. It is also the nickname of the CIA - Intelligence, politicking, stabs in the dark, secret things, codified meanings. The book plays off the crisis of modernism, its slippage into postmodernism, where anything goes and nothing moves, against its critique of the heartland, of Modernity, which is both sharp as an axe and malleable as clay. Modernisation brings the four horsemen of the apocalypse, drinkable tapwater, the Russian Revolution, the Internet and the Crash.