Getting it together in the suburbs seems to be a peculiarly middle class rite of passage – the moment when city living is no longer tenable and a migration in pursuit of wider spaces, cleaner living and better schools is required. Such considerations are behind the decision taken by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles, who with their young, Aspergersy son Copley exchange their life in Boston for a more spacious existence in Dolores Woods, a large development on the outskirts of an un-named Midwestern city, in Patrick Flanery’s tremendous new novel, Fallen Land. Fallen Land refers explicitly to the history Dolores Woods itself, but is also more broadly a comment on contemporary America itself. Flanery has in his sights the failure of the American Dream and the gradual privatisation of the entire country, whereby the state has “ceded all responsibility to civic life and public wellbeing to private corporations” like the one Nathaniel himself works for: a “provider of solutions for all sectors of society including corporate, domestic, government, and parastatal security architecture – facilities to meet all protection needs”. Nathaniel and his family have recently bought the flagship property on the Dolores Woods scheme – “pastiches of Victorian architecture, just out of scale” – and Flanery follows the history of the house and the land on which it was built. Nathaniel shares narrative duties with two other characters. There is his neighbour, Louise Washington, a retired black school teacher who knows that the Noailles house is built on the site of a filled-in sinkhole that conceals the corpses of the local mayor and Louise’s grandfather, who were lynched together in 1919. And then there is Paul Krovik, an ambitious property developer who bought the land from Louise and watched his dream for “two hundred ‘luxury executive homes’, each located on a three-quarter acre plot” unravel, first due to subsidence and latterly the financial crisis, leaving only 21 completed properties surrounded by “empty spaces lapsing back into wildness, an assortment of abandoned archaeological excavations gaping between the finished houses, scattered widely around half a dozen streets.” Abandoned by his family, Paul now lives covertly in a secret fallout shelter built beneath what was once his own home, “the jewel in the crown of Dolores Woods” – the house bought by the Noailles. Flanery’s principals are all haunted. Louise, who knows the history of every nook and cranny of what was once Poplar Farm is burdened by the guilt that she has sold her family’s land and watched as Krovik has reshaped it beyond all recognition into Dolores Woods. Nathaniel has to contend with the memories of an abusive father alongside his nagging concerns that this move from Boston hasn’t been as successful as it might have. Krovik, meanwhile, is gradually unravelling in his state-of-the-art bunker, where his mind swirls with the teachings of the shifty “great man”, which Krovik’s overbearing father drilled into him as a child: “Society is nothing but a conspiracy against you. If the country is at war, then the average citizen has to look out for his own even more than in peacetime, government be damned.” In Paul Krovik's mind, “it is essential to plan not just for attack by foreign terrorists or governments, but also for the possibility of hostile fellow Americans, for a new civil war, or for an environmental, technological, or biochemical conclusion to the human era on this planet.” Krovik has taken to stealing at night into his old house, moving the furniture around and covering the walls with graffiti, for which the Noailles at first suspect Copley is responsible. No good can come of this. For Flanery, Krovik’s paranoia is a condition particular to contemporary America. On one hand, there is Nathaniel’s employer, the many-tentacled EKK corporation, who’re intent on turning the country’s prison population into “the largest body of slave labor since the emancipation”; on the other, there is Copley’s school with its classroom surveillance feeds, fingerprint scanners and guards who carry tasers to subdue disruptive pupils. In places, the book vaults into high-end dystopian satire, and you might think a little of Don DeLillo in Flanery's depiction of suburban anxiety. But there is also something poignant about Flanery’s three protagonists. All of them have worked for what they believed to be a better America, and all of them have watched their dreams fail. For an epigraph, Flanery quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House Of The Seven Gables: “In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, someone is always at the drowning-point.” In Fallen Land, it seems as if an entire country has reached the drowning-point. Fallen Land by Patrick Flanery is published by Atlantic Books Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

I don’t know if you saw it, but BBC2’s David Bowie documentary, Five Years, screened at the weekend, was very entertaining. A lot of the archive footage was familiar, but there were also some splendidly unexpected highlights, like a sequence of Bowie filmed at Andy Warhol’s Factory, which rather vividly suggested that Bowie’s talent for mime isn’t perhaps all it’s cracked up to be in which he pretended to unspool his own entrails and pluck out his heart, a performance that was doubtless accompanied by much sniggering from Andy's crowd. Elsewhere, there was plenty of exciting footage of Bowie as Ziggy and The Thin White Duke and you can never really get enough of so-called experts stating the fucking obvious in unusually loud voices. But by far the most eccentric contribution to the programme, however, came with the appearance of King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, who had some interesting things to say about playing guitar on ‘Heroes’ and pretty much stole the show in the process. “Anyone who’s playing ‘Beauty And The Beast’,” he said of that album’s opening track, a weird little glint in his eye. “You know they get erections.” I laughed out loud reading a review of Five Years in the following morning’s Observer, in which Fripp was described as looking like “Benny Hill would have looked if he’d hung out with Brian Eno and married Toyah Willcox”. This barely did justice to Fripp’s genuine oddness, of which I have some first-hand experience. In April 1979, I was despatched by Melody Maker to interview him about his new album, Exposure, his first solo album. I get the train down to Bournemouth and he drives over from the nearby village of Wimbourne, where he has a cottage, to meet me at the station. He starts talking before I have both feet on the platform and doesn’t stop for what seems like about four days of torrential chat that even as he negotiates the lunchtime traffic into the town centre in his neat green Volvo leaves me reeling and queasy and in danger of throwing up, which I later do. I am at the time of writing already sick – have in fact spent the last week coughing like a consumptive young Romantic poet, the doomed Chatterton, perhaps, pale unto death in a very big blouse and knickerbockers, fading away in a damp attic, adrift in bilious dreams. Fripp’s yapping is now making me feel wholly delirious. We go for a snack in some ghastly vegetarian place Fripp knows where over some kind of nut cutlet, we review his post-Crimson career – which notably takes in recordings with Peter Gabriel and with David Bowie and Eno on Heroes. He has also spent a lengthy spell at the International Academy For Continuous Education in Sherbourne, where he studied the teachings of mystic philosophers GI Gurdjieff and PD Ouspensky, the Sherbourne academy based on Gurdjieff’s own Institute For The Harmonious Development Of Man. Cutlets consumed and washed down with some sludgy vegetarian drink that looks like something a cat might have vomited up, we find ourselves in a local hostelry, packed with lunchtime drinkers. Fripp finds us a table which we share with two businessmen, who give us suspicious looks when I set up my tape recorder, which is when Fripp says he’d like – if I have no objection – to preface our interview with a statement he’s prepared, in which he will outline what he describes as a three year career plan called The Drive To 1981. I tell him to go ahead. “Thank you so much," he says, and begins to speak directly into my microphone as if he’s addressing a public meeting or a planning enquiry. Fully 40 minutes later, almost without taking a breath, he’s filled almost an entire side of C90 tape and is still going strong, eventually shedding light on what Exposure’s all about. “Exposure,” he says, “deals with tweaking the vocabulary of, for want of a better word, ‘rock’ music. It investigates the vocabulary and, hopefully, expands the possibilities of expression and introduces a more sophisticated emotional dynamic than one would normally find within ‘rock’.” Thus concludes Fripp’s opening statement, which he had begun nearly an hour ago. He looks at me. I’m speechless, quite overwhelmed. “ONE LANCASHIRE HOTPOT AND A CHEESE FLAN – THANKYEWWWW!” bellows the barmaid over the heads of the crowd. Fripp winces at the sound of her voice, but is quickly back in the conversational swing of things and soon telling me about his monastic tenure at the institute in Sherbourne, which sounds to me like a hell on earth. “There were 100 people living in the house,” he recalls breezily. “They’d come from all different walks of life, from different countries. In my year, we lost about 20 pupils, three of them to the asylum. It was very hard going, one of the most uncomfortable physical appearances of my life. It was always horribly cold. And it wasn’t just the physical cold. There was a kind of cold,” he says, voice lowering conspiratorially, the businessmen who have been listening to him with baffled fascination now leaning forward to catch what he says next, “that at times could chill the soul. . .” “ONE SAUSAGE EGG AND BEANS AND A CHEESE FLAN – THANKYEWWWW!” the barmaid screeches. “I shared a dormitory with five other men,” Fripp ploughs on. “One from Alaska, two Americans, an Irishman, a Polish American and an Italian. . .” (“Heard it,” I’m tempted to interrupt.) “The Italian,” Fripp goes on, “would wake up most mornings at 3 am and fart sufficiently loudly to wake me up. The Alaskan had his bed next to mine. He was always rather depressed and unhappy. His head was hunched into his shoulders, like this. . .” Fripp does an impression of a somewhat deformed Alaskan. The businessmen move nervously away from us. “One of my favourite memories of Sherbourne,” he’s telling me now, “is of being in a trench, digging for a water main. There I was at the bottom of an eight-foot trench, which has taken two days to dig, with 28 other people, all of whom without distinction I detest – suddenly it begins to rain. And then a cheerful voice at the top of this trench as one looks up says, ‘Hello! We’re digging in the wrong place! The water main’s over here! You’ll have to start again.’ “It was marvellous,” he says with a note of truly sombre reflection, “to have one’s lofty ideas of oneself so deflated. I mean, I think everyone who went into Sherbourne thought that God had selected them uniquely and specifically to save the universe, so it was a very, very useful deflation.” “LAST ORDERS, LADEEZNGENMEN, PERLEEESE,” the barmaid howls. “Time to move on,” Fripp announces, so we do – to somewhere called The Salad Centre, where we have some herbal tea that tastes like it’s been strained through someone’s dirty socks and Fripp talks and talks and talks and I begin to feel even more strangely disembodied and start wondering if I am going to be stuck forever in this strange purgatory where I will have to listen to Fripp’s apparently endless discourse as eternity unfolds, Fripp’s voice haunting me lo until the end of all time. I stare blankly at him, unable by now to take in whatever he’s saying – something about “riding the dynamics of disaster” – reduced to mystical static that means nothing to me. On and on he goes, until the light starts to drain from the day, even as all life begins to drain from me. We’re back at the station now, Fripp still talking. I want frankly to scream, beg him for a moment just to stop. But on he goes. I feel like setting fire to myself. Bile is rising in my throat. Where – oh, where – is my train? “I’m currently working on a completely new theory,” he says, and I’m afraid he’s going to tell me what it is, which he does. “I’m working on the theory that Christ spent the missing 12 years of his life in Wimbourne,” he begins, at which point I can stand it no more and promptly vomit where I stand. “Oh, dear,” says Fripp. “Might it have been the nut cutlets?” Pic: Michael Ochs Archives

If, as internet speculation and promo footage imply, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” has a Cold War/atomic age subtext, Boards Of Canada’s focus is, as ever, long-range and aesthetic: less on the actual devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, more on nebulous creep and on the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud when observed from a relatively safe distance. It’s a potentially glib way of toying with signifiers: Armageddon as nature documentary. But Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin’s work has always been about landscape and inference rather than specifics, and the pervading influence of this, their fourth album and first in eight years, is once again uneasy, but attractive. Those eight years do not appear to have been spent radically reassessing their musical choices. If anything, swathes of “Tomorrow’s Harvest” feels like a retrenchment into the dense, sometimes oppressive soundworld of “Geogaddi” after the comparatively sunny, at least superficially more organic, designs of their last album, “The Campfire Headphase”. Dedicated followers of BOC (and the band have long, albeit slyly, encouraged their own cult with codes and mysteries; with the artful weaving of nostalgia, the uncanny and higher mathematics) saw this coming, of course, some time before the video for “Reach For The Dead” was leaked last night. With hindsight, the pre-release campaign for “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, involving one-off 12-inches, strings of significant numbers, inexplicable broadcasts and so on, feels a bit botched and unfulfilled. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jTg-q6Drt0 But the excitement it generated was palpable, even in the shadow of the monolithic operation being carried out simultaneously by Daft Punk, and the resonances of number stations and shortwave espionage, heavily suggested a return to darker terrain (was that old story about them recording in a disused nuclear bunker ever proved?). “Tomorrow’s Harvest” begins with a perky callsign fanfare, though it is closer to a ‘70s TV channel ident than one of those deployed by the numbers stations on The Conet Project. There are numbers here, most notably in “Telepath”, though the way they run in sequence from one to ten, before being fragmented, seems to suggest dislocation more than code. It’s an obvious risk, though, to jump to any kind of conclusions about a BOC record after three or four listens: it’s not just the likely proliferation of hidden meanings, but also the way the brothers’ music works so gradually and insidiously. As a consequence, opinions here come with even more caveats than usual… After the fanfare, “Gemini” moves into what will become one of the default settings for much of “Tomorrow’s Harvest” – a sort of menaced abstraction, that on first couple of listens fractionally recalls Goblin dabbling in ambience. Again, the closest back catalogue reference point remains “Geogaddi”, but this time it often feels as if the passages that were once used as interludes have been extended and become the focus: the murky, skittering beats and devil voices of “Split Your Infinities” runs to four and a half minutes; “White Cyclosa” takes up three minutes when, on “Geogaddi”, one suspects it would’ve been compressed into a third of that time. These are not easy tracks to crack, and the fanatical layering of sound means that it’s hard to come to a fast conclusion about them (there’s a real serendipity that one of BOC’s true peers, My Bloody Valentine, should stealthily resume operations in the same year). I don’t envy Louis Pattison, who put together a piece for the new issue of Uncut after a playback at Warp, but his detection of a semi-buried John Carpenter influence, that I haven’t picked up on previous records, seems apposite (especially on “Collapse”). With the more immediate tracks, there’s a not-unpleasant sense that Boards Of Canada’s aesthetic, their palette of dulled breakbeats, melodies that are redolent of old documentary soundtracks bent and submerged, muffled voices and so on, is now so distinctive that it could be taken as self-parody. The listening stream uses fake track names, which are no more or less daft/plausible than the actual ones: a sequence of BOC songs titled “Split Your Infinities”, “Uritual”, “Nothing Is Real” (the ur-BOC track, perhaps), “Sundown”, “New Seeds” and “Come To Dust” could have been fabricated by a mischievous impersonator, such is its occult closeness to cliché. As ever with this sort of thing, though, if you’ve been satisfied with BOC’s style in the past, it seems churlish to criticise them for sticking with it. “Reach For The Dead”, as you already know, is the clear evidence of that, but “Cold Earth” is the first real, swift classic on “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, one of those fragile, beautiful headnodders in the vein of “Music Is Math” (it occurred to me this morning that I saw a few BOC live shows around the cusp of the millennium that consisted of almost entirely unreleased tunes, and wondered whether any of those have belatedly ended up on this collection?). Gradually, the album moves to a comparative clarity: the graceful love theme that emerges from the murk of “Sick Times”; “Palace Posy”, with a directness and leftfield bounce building into mechanistic, haunted funk, reminiscent of both “Music Has The Right To Children” and their Warp contemporaries, Plaid. “Palace Posy”, too, finds the sampled voices unusually deployed to harmonic ends – it’s not exactly a BOC track with singing on it, but they haven’t really been much closer, as far as I can remember, to such a whimsical concept (maybe “1969”?). Then, tracks 15 and 16, make for a fantastic ending (undermined, predictably, by one ominous drone, “Semena Mertvykh”, in their wake). “Come To Dust” is an end-titles, widescreen resolution of all that has gone before, the Carpenter-style arpeggiators pushed into the background as one of Sandison and Eoin’s grandly portentous melodies moves into focus. And “New Seeds”, as the title flags, is a rare flickering of optimism; upbeat, vague kin to “Dayvan Cowboy” and, after about four minutes, blessed with one of those covertly ecstatic gear-shifts at which they’ve always excelled. Strangest of all, though, “New Seeds”’ first riff is a jittery, rattling thing that reminds me of Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”; not something I expected. Perhaps, the hidden resonances and black ops of Boards Of Canada have greater depths than even the most assiduous conspiracy theorist can conceive… Check this: an interview I did with Boards Of Canada circa Geogaddi. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey