The tiny tablets, combined with the whisky, had started to blur the bleak lines of young Leon's life.
Allusions to "The Waste Land" recur, and the book ends with a collage of bleak lines from the poem.
An estate resident, Mary Finch, takes a bleaker line: "I think that the Olympics has lost me my home".
An estate resident, Mary Finch, takes a bleaker line: "I think that the Olympics has lost me my home". She has lived on the Carpenters for 40 years and is disinclined to depart quietly.
It's a children's book, sort of, but with scenes of bloody battle and befouling of the land and a final image that runs against the grain of Marsden's bleak closing line ("Who will save us from the rabbits?"): a rabbit and an indigenous creature sit facing each other on a littered plain, perhaps tentatively beginning the process of mutual recognition.
Has a bleaker punch line ever been written?
Ellen, played by Jessica Barden, is a gobby, paint-huffing hellion, friendless and flailing as her gran dies in the box-room and her mother parties with a bleak conga-line of awful men.
The chamber-pop opener, Lysandre's Theme, is the entranceway to 28 minutes of despondency and surprisingly chaste desire – it's all about fingertips brushing and coy gazes rather than red-blooded amour – which end with the bleak final lines of the closing track, Part of Me (Lysandre's Epilogue), "Oh, you were a part of me, but that part of me is gone".
Remember when she interviewed Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford about their Blade Runner remake, opening with the line "Bleak, dystopian – an absolute nightmare to be honest – and that's just my interviewing techniques," before calling Ryan Gosling "Ry" less than two minutes in?
