X-Ray

X-Ray (1994) was Ray Davies' first major attempt to write prose outside his musical career as founding member of the British rock band the Kinks. Robert Polito calls it an "experimental non-fiction" and describes Davies as "a prose stylist of Nabokovian ambition." X-Ray The book, subtitled as an "unauthorized autobiography," employs a nameless 19-year-old first-person narrator hired by 'the Corporation' to seek out and interview a slightly demented geriatric version of Davies himself ten to twenty years after the time of the novel's publication. Thus, while technically an autobiography, the work has an unreliable narrator. In many ways a work of fiction, it reveals many factual details concerning the Kinks and other important figures of the swinging sixties, but tends to do so in a literary fashion. By employing this narrative device, Davies was able to shed some light on the life of the Kinks without resorting to the usual pedestrian 'he said/she said' mechanics often associated with memoirs of celebrities. Basic storyline