I'm only telling you this to let you know what a silly thing it is to live like I do. What it was, I gotsacked from my seventeenth job for fighting or gambling-I don't know which-and because Iwas hardly ever there. I was gambling all right, but someone called me a cheat and swung atme, I moved my head and swung back and this kid went in to one of the bosses with bloodcoming out of his mouth saying I was a standover man.
The Chantic Bird is the confession of a teenage anarchist, who combines a contempt forcontemporary society with a great tenderness and warmth for his younger siblings and for Bee,the girl who looks after them.
The first of David Ireland's masterful novels, The Chantic Bird contains the same characteristicindictment of the bovine mindlessness of collective humanity, and the home-owning wageslaves.
'It has been my aim to take apart, then build up piece by piece, this mosaic of one kind of humanlife...to remind my present age of its industrial adolescence.' David Ireland
This edition of The Chantic Bird comes with a new introduction by Geordie Williamson.