The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club By Richard Foster – Book Review

The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club
By Richard Foster

Published by Orca Press 14th February 2025

Reading Richard Foster’s latest novel The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club, a collection of stories located in the Duin-en Bollenstreek (Dunes and Bulb Region) in the west of The Netherlands, it’s difficult to ignore the host of Bruegelesque animations and set-pieces he breathes to life.

The British-born, Netherlands-based Foster has made a career out of astute and esoteric music criticism, with a style that makes comfortable bedfellows of tradition, honesty, and weirdness; the written equivalent of an aspergillum filled with warm LSD. In his 2022 debut novel Flower Factory, also published by Ortac Press, Foster’s freshly arrived protagonist meditated on the European ghosts of the past and those on the horizon that washed over the continent as the millennium approached. Consternations marching to the same location – but from different times. It bred the uncomfortable feeling that mythologies of the past and mythologies of the future are one and the same.

Like his debut, The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club is loosely anchored in the torpid seasonal warehouse employment of the region’s tulip factories where the protagonist works – but this time round the narrator appears more integrated and settled within the very precise intricacies of Dutch culture. This time set on the other side of the millennium, a lot of the young man anxiety is traded for older man appeasement, with arguments over what’s on the radio traded-in for jovial visits to the in-laws. The central tension within the wider novel (if one is to treat both novels as intrinsically linked, or perhaps even as a diptych) is that Foster’s set of characters remember the past as a halcyon time full of bustling cafès, values, and rich characters. An air of forgetfulness pervades the prose of memory, although the worries and revelations feared for in Flower Factory are very much present here in The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club, including The Netherlands own continued lunge to the far-right.

The subtly and experience of Foster’s pen means that what appears on its surface as an autofictive middle-aged bildungsroman runs far deeper, tapping into the murkiness of societal and individual psychology that examines how things both seemingly change and forever stay the same. It’s a sly experimental device that treads in the same areas as 1960s experimental British writer B.S. Johnson, who used the physicality of the book to expose the vapidity of memory, by cutting out holes in pages or by putting all chapters of a novel loose into a box and leaving it up to the reader to choose which chapter to read next.

The lasting sensation, after a final burst of fire in the book’s penultimate chapter, is that of 16th-century Netherlandish painter Pieter Breughel, who, like Foster, tapped into the mythological muddle of the national dream. In particular, Breughel’s painting of The Land of Cockneye, a fabled Utopia where “medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labour and the daily struggle for meagre food” comes to mind. In The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club, we have something of a century 21st equivalent, a charming, caustic book that like T.S. Eliot penned in his 1920 poem Gerontion, “hast nor youth nor age / but as it were an after dinner sleep/dreaming of both”.

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Words by Robert Davidson

• Source: NEWHD MEDIA