Electricity.

"Very tough and very tender, and Lily is a fearsome and compellingly alive creation."

"Misanthropic, original and highly entertaining."

Independent on Sunday

"Lily's voice, and Robinson's writing, is viciously sharp, with a blunt and almost brutal lyricism."

Los Angeles Times

“Robinson's delicate tiptoeing between the two personae is confident and exquisite"

Herald

"Not since the first line of Camus' The Outsider has a mother being so brusquely despatched. Never before have the vertices of epilepsy being so convincingly captured in a narrator's voice or the odd geometry of a sufferer's life made so clear... This is a novel about that devalued concept 'empowerment', about a woman who is in every regard a passive object but who, by dint of submission to overwhelming currents of love, loyalty, self-reliance, a need to say the unsayable, manages to rise above circumstances in the most heartlifting way. It's a genuinely remarkable debut."

Scotland on Sunday

"Electricity is a thorny, uncompromising novel, with attitude. It is also -- thanks to its sharp-edged, hard-living, tough-talking narrator -- mesmerising, uplifting and unexpectedly tender"

Jim Crace

"Robinson's startling debut takes us deep into the flawed, combative world of a severe epileptic. Lily O'Connor - rebellious, independent, troubled and very ill. The descriptions of Lily's violent fits are extremely disconcerting and Robinson expertly captures the dislocation of day-to-day life for someone in thrall to a debilitating and seemingly random condition. Layout and typography are used jarringly to demonstrate the effects of the illness and to show how traumatising the fits are to Lily. The result is a novel of illness and involuntarily altered states that presents reality as something unpleasant and tentative. Robinson's prose is taut, and Lily an unnervingly honest and frank narrator. Not only that, she's great company. Electricity is an impressive achievement."

Time Out

"Ray Robinson's eviscerating debut novel. Fast, furious plot, kaleidoscopic imagery, blunt observations and a wry, ingenuous, hugely compassionate heroine make Electricity a breathtaking assault on the senses."

Guardian

"A gritty tour of both London and the wrecked neurological pathways of epileptic Lily O'Connor. With equal parts hip misanthropy and sweet, clean-hearted sentiment, Ray Robinson convincingly channels the voice of a woman at war with the material world, for whom language itself arrives as a jarring shock to the brain."

Jonathan Raymond

"Lily O'Connor is one of the most convincingly alluring characters in contemporary fiction. Robinson tells her story through a highly-charged vernacular that crackles with a skewed and peculiar poetry. Electricity is an extraordinary feat of linguistic ventriloquism; touching, beautiful and compelling. I'll never forget it."

Niall Griffiths

"A welcome addition to the burgeoning field of the literature of psychopathology, and deserves to be widely read. A quest, narrated in Lily's engagingly unsentimental voice, which balances the purging of her abused childhood against unglamorous adventures among the lost souls of the metropolis. Electricity is a powerful, passionate and informative book"

TLS

"Electricity blew me away. Lily is the kind of narrator you'd follow into all sorts of places - and then you do, under her spell. Hypnotic, tender, and quick, it's a novel of rough edges that reads smooth somehow. Ray Robinson is a new master of the language - he can make it do just about anything he wants to."

Alexander Chee

"Robinson's startling debut takes us deep into the flawed, combative world of a severe epileptic. Lily O'Connor - rebellious, independent, troubled and very ill. The descriptions of Lily's violent fits are extremely disconcerting and Robinson expertly captures the dislocation of day-to-day life for someone in thrall to a debilitating and seemingly random condition. Layout and typography are used jarringly to demonstrate the effects of the illness and to show how traumatising the fits are to Lily. The result is a novel of illness and involuntarily altered states that presents reality as something unpleasant and tentative. Robinson's prose is taut, and Lily an unnervingly honest and frank narrator. Not only that, she's great company. Electricity is an impressive achievement."

Time Out

"Ray Robinson's Lily is an extraordinary character and his handling of her epilepsy is equally remarkable. This is a debut novel which has quite rightly garnered some high praise."

Daily Exp

“A vividly portrayed, most unconventional protagonist dominates this punchy first novel from an award-winning British short-story writer.

She's 30-year-old Lily O'Connor, a sufferer from temporal lobe epilepsy since early childhood, when her intemperate and unstable mother threw her down a flight of stairs. Lily tells her own story, which begins when her mother (from whom she was "taken away" following the aforementioned "accident") dies, and Lily leaves her entry-level job taking tickets at an amusement park arcade and heads for London, seeking her two brothers. She finds—but discovers she has nothing in common with—sleek, self-absorbed Barry, a professional card player interested in nothing beyond training himself for the World Poker Open. But Mikey, the brother she loved, who had gone missing years earlier, is still nowhere to be found. Adrift in London (which she envisions as "a pile of bodies writhing like fat worms in a fisherman's box"), Lily makes connections doomed to short-circuit: with Mel, the woman Cambridge grad and banker who takes her in (and undoubtedly loves Lily, secretly and guiltily); and with the cryptic Dave, a smug, secretive electrician who becomes her lover and abuser, echoing the pattern in which preadolescent Lily had been caught up with her mother's creepy boyfriend Don [...] Whenever we're inside her own thoughts and perceptions, the novel soars. Innovative typography helps: images of pills Lily takes, lined up in a row; skewed, distorted jumbles of letters, denoting her frequent convulsive seizures. And Lily's voice is impressive—raw, angry, emotionally urgent, rising frequently to inchoate poetry (e.g., water in a canal runs "oily and slow … sound[s] like treacle glooping. Stench like burnt toast").

She's a survivor like no other, and the mixed pleasure of inhabiting her jagged psyche is the best reason for reading this daring tightrope-walk of a novel.”

Kirkus Review

“The enormous, shivering typeface scattered through Ray Robinson's first novel is a giveaway: this narrative occasionally devolves, or rather explodes, into overwhelming surges. The book represents them as half-syllables: ERRRMMG- gree- GREE, HEEYA! But this isn't nonsense. It's an expression of the electric power surging through Lily O'Connor's body. Lily, the book's narrator, is epileptic. Explosions that sometimes take pages of the novel have cumulatively taken weeks and months from her life.
Lily is caustic, troubled and likable.
Her periodic seizures have left her defensive and self-protecting. Worse, she experiences her life as a chopped-up series of weeks and days she refers to as a life in "outtakes."
"My body is covered with silver flecks, rips [...] I have a long way to fall and I fall a lot," she muses.
Life is punctuated by pills. Scars she can't remember getting gleam above slices of time she's lost. Despite it all, she's bold and resilient: "Thrash, get up, get on with it. That's what I say," she remarks.

Throughout the odyssey that follows, it's Lily's voice, lurching, self-mocking and tender, that buoys the book. It's sweetly confiding, sometimes raspy, cheerfully observing both the world of her brain and the world beyond it. Her voice is by turns angry, fascinated, keenly observant, ecstatic, overmedicated, undermedicated, sheepish and alive. Lily watches her limitations with cheerful aplomb; she carries her condition with her as an uneasy but constant companion […] She knows her brain, the force that governs her voice, as separate from herself, but she's also governed by it. It eludes her grasp […] When doctors change her medication, the narrative shifts, becoming more disjointed, then sluggish. This, too, is part of what makes the book memorable: its intimacy with varied states of a changeable mind...

She struggles with the ambivalence of living with a handicap - if there were surgery that could cure her, would she even want to get better? Both her self-awareness, and the limitations of self-knowledge, pose the question of how any of us know ourselves. In "Electricity," Robinson's got mastery of perspective, voice and interiority. There's tenderness to the way he captures Lily and records the trials and tribulations of her often difficult, ultimately redemptive, journey.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“Since its inception, the vocal range of British literature has steadily expanded like an evermore adventurous choir. In its infancy our indigenous novel knew only one register: that of the heterosexual middle class white man. Gradually, however, this soloist was forced to share the stage with other voices as the choral repertoire grew to include the protest songs of the dispossessed. First women and the working classes, then gays, immigrants and their offspring found themselves represented in literature creating the polyphonic canon that we know today. Each new group of choristers has brought with them a new perspective on life in Britain revivifying that which was only narrowly known and giving readers access to the inner lives of individuals radically different from themselves. One interesting group in this increasingly populous chorus are tonally distinct not because of social or economic status, but due to their physical or neurological otherness. In addition to the established voices of the blind and deaf, there is the newly recruited basso profundo of Christopher Boone, the star of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and, more recently still, the booming contralto of Lily – she's six-foot, from Blackpool and uses 'fuck' as punctuation; she's definitely a contralto – the protagonist of Ray Robinson's debut novel Electricity.

Although their conditions are very different – Christopher has Asperger's Syndrome whereas Lily suffers from epilepsy – there are many structural similarities between the two books. Both novels see their protagonist leave the safety of provincial life to journey to the bewildering chaos of London in search of a long-lost family member. Both use linguistic and typographic innovation in an attempt to recreate their respective mental disorders and both contain a simple drawing of a constellation: Haddon has Orion and Robinson, the Plough – surely evidence of the latter's acknowledged debt to his forerunner.

Despite this architectural symmetry, the two novels are completely different experiences. Although Christopher is emotionally stunted his inadvertent wittiness and Washingtonian honesty make him instantly adorable. Lily, however, is battle weary woman of the underclass whose hard life is reflected in Robinson's abrasive, aggressive prose and it takes her time to earn the reader's affection.
Following the death of her despised mother Lily is reunited with her brother Barry, a bejewelled professional poker player and drug-addled never-do-well. Meeting Barry dredges up memories of her other brother Mikey, also due his share of their mother's estate, and she sets off for London in search of him.
As expected, the plot is the least important aspect of this book; its success rests and falls on Robinson's ability to recreate the experience of a mental disorder that he has never endured and, as a male PHD, his capacity to inhabit the voice of a poorly educated woman.

The latter, particularly Lily's femininity, he achieves with admirable consistency and he just about deals with the fault line that runs through any novel written from the perspective of the inarticulate: the often contradictory need for both verisimilitude and aesthetic accomplishment. Lines like 'I've just got to put up with the broken ribs and the black eyes. Like being married to some psycho I can't ever divorce,' represent a perfect union of authenticity and artistry…

Creating a voice, however, is just part of the challenge and it is the steady and unfussy manner in which Robinson expands on the metaphorical possibilities of epilepsy that convinces the reader of the artistry of the book. In Robinson's hands Lily's battle with her condition and her dogged refusal to be defined by it, becomes emblematic of every battle against conditioning. Like her literary forebears, Anna, Emma and Elizabeth; Lily vacillates between determinist surrender and wilful protest, and in doing so she wins the reader over.

Late on in the book, a doctor asks, 'why don't you wear an identity tag, Lily?'
'Because I'm not a dog,' she defiantly replies.”

The New Statesman

"Debut novelist Ray Robinson's Electricity is staggering. Thirty year old Lily searches for her long-lost younger brother, trying to unravel his mysterious disappearance. New to London, she discovers the friendship of Mel, her first real woman friend ever. Lily also has epilepsy.
Robinson details the riotous horror of Lily's disconnected electrical circuits in her brain. We experience her fear and learn the truth about her past through her unpredictable condition. From pillowed and padded table edges and waterproof linen to a safe undemanding job in a Blackpool Bingo hall, Lily has to protect herself against the humiliating fits. She's a powerful character - earning love and respect; rejecting pity.
Robinson cleverly underscores the debilitating disease with visual distortion in the text using out-of-focus bold print between chapters. Her dependency on tablets and changing medication is also illustrated within the narrative. Disconcertingly, Lily's story begins at chapter 26. The countdown of chapters only increases the tension of her search. Robinson's use of dialogue is also a work of art.

Electricity, quite simply, is brilliant."

Terry Ellen
Rating: 5/5

The Write Co.

An orphaned, fiercely determined, poorly educated, epileptic named Lily tries to solve the mystery of her missing brother, and discover love - an unlikely subject for a book? Cynics might say it's already been done with Asperger's (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time) and Tourette's (Motherless Brooklyn) so why not epilepsy - but Electricity is better than that. As a tale it is almost Dickensian, not in length but in theme - the down-and-out kids living in doorways in London, the soft-hearted junk-shop dealer who serves as surrogate father, the saintly corporate girlfriend who pulls her off the streets, the crooked detective. Like Dickens, Robinson offers up a tale of a life we have never lived (or I haven't anyway), but lets us be touched by the loss of our central character. The mystery part of the plot offers suspense that really carried this reader through the novel with interest. The writer plays virtuosically with language in a way that helps to reveal Lily's state of mind around her seizures. Finally that Dickensian hope of being reunited with her family offers the possibility of real redemption. I won't tell you if she finds him or not, for that you will have to read the book yourself. Lily's disease seems an apt metaphor for her life - something against which she is powerless comes in and shakes her up and she is left with black-out periods on either side of her seizures for which she must fill in the gaps in her existence. It is a dark life that Lily lives, but Robinson resists the temptation of simply sensationalizing the grit - there is a point to it all. I found this book a most satisfying read - thank you Scott for another good recommendation. This post along with this one and this one constitute my full reactions.

Bookeywookey