In Cold Type

Topic magazine is a kaleidoscopic new British literary review, still in its infancy and edited by a bunch of precocious Cambridge graduate students. Not since Granta or the original Grand Street has there been such an original and absorbing new lit mag. Reading it is like letting your mind play; a totally pleasurable intellectual experience without the hip, stylish, babyish annoyances of the average new publication. As does Granta on occasion, Topic takes a subject ("War" in its first issue, "Fantasy" in its second) and gets two dozen or so writers and thinkers--sometimes just individuals with stories to tell--to come up with a turn on it. Some of the pieces are silly, but even those have something to offer--some amusing tidbit, an interesting attitude, a big literary voice, a deeply weird idiosyncrasy to reveal. Best of all, the pieces are bite-size and palatable. Topic is like a chocolate sampler for the mind.

Here's a run-through of the CVs of some contributors to the Fantasy issue: A poet, an anorexic writer, a classics professor, a graphic designer, a British knight, an English Civil War recreator, a professor of cognitive science, a Dutch photographer, a computer programmer; plus David Leavitt (the novelist), Steve McCurry (the photographer), a Ukrainian male prostitute and an American submarine-builder/restaurateur.

The least self-conscious and possibly best piece in the issue--although there is material that is much more serious--is the one from David Gibbons, the English Civil War re-enactor. Gibbons is a man who, on his own admission, "spends much of my spare time clad in archaic costume, speaking in the English of three hundred and fifty years ago and pretending, along with several thousand like minded characters, to be a soldier in the English Civil War." He works at the Torrington 1646 Civil War Heritage Centre in Devon, and plays "Robert de Gilbert, turncoat musketeer late of Lord Hopton's Western Army and now under the command of Lord Fairfax." The piece is written with a sense both of decency and of the ridiculous, and yet has an utter delight in absurdity and lack of real embarrassment that makes one think of John Cleese's best performances and characters. What a job this would be for Basil Fawlty.

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