Mara: This episode covers the reviews Jones has published of Martyn Bey’s debut novel Come In Pink, a book that critics have been reaching for some fairly extravagant vocabulary to describe. Let’s start with what the novel actually is and why the reviews keep circling the same tensions.
Pip: There’s a novel out there that apparently supplies lavender soap to Pontius Pilate, debates Marx in the same breath as “zipper sex,” and calls the whole thing a love letter to misfits. Martyn Jones has been reading it closely — very closely.
Camp, Conscience, and the Cracks in Postmodernity
Pip: The central puzzle across all three reviews is how a novel this deliberately excessive — sequins, erotic interludes, spectral narrators — can also be making a serious philosophical argument. That’s the tension worth unpacking: is the camp the point, or is it the vehicle?
Mara: The Guardian review sets it up directly. “Truth is fine, but truth dipped in glitter is divine,” declares the narrator Lloyd Jones — and the review calls that line a manifesto the book follows with religious zeal.
Pip: So the glitter isn’t decoration. It’s the epistemology. Which is either a very bold move or the best possible excuse for a very long party scene.
Mara: The TLS review frames it more soberly: Bey’s project is described as a fictionalized dialogue with the grand narratives of the twentieth century, Marx and Feuerbach specifically, while simultaneously revelling in what it calls “pastiche, parody, and mischievous cynicism.” The intellectual and the sensory are deliberately refused separation — a debate on Marx sits alongside graphic dream sequences by design.
Pip: And the review by Florence la Galesa, published under the title “Sequins Against the Storm,” makes the sharpest case for why that refusal matters. It identifies the novel’s animating tension as the shrinking space for nuance — Lloyd’s lament that “extremes despise subtlety” recurring like a bass line beneath the glitter.
Mara: That review also names the “Karen Talks” sequences as among the book’s most compelling inventions — livestreamed jeremiads on wokeness and liberal hypocrisy that capture, in its words, the vertiginous moral theatre of the internet age.
Pip: Vanessa Bell’s review, “Glitter and Abyss,” traces the same thread through the prose style itself — mornings arriving “like a diva with too much perfume,” free will described as “sin, but with sequins.” The camp isn’t evasion; it’s how Bey dismantles binaries.
Mara: All three reviews acknowledge the structural risk. Florence la Galesa puts it plainly: polemic crowds out plot, characters become mouthpieces, and one begins to long for a little less chiffon. But each reviewer keeps reading anyway.
Pip: Which is perhaps the most honest critical verdict available.
Mara: The question all three leave open is whether camp, as a mode of resistance, can actually hold against what the TLS calls “resurgent absolutisms” — or whether the sequins are, in the end, just sequins.
Pip: And that question doesn’t stay inside the novel.
Mara: What stays with you is the underlying argument: that irony and excess might be the last available tools for holding nuance open when everything else flattens into slogans.
Pip: Whether a martini and a well-timed wink are sufficient — that seems like a question worth returning to next time.
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