Friday, March 2, 2012

The Redhead Blog

Following my previous post I should also mention that the Redhead book has its own website - here. And on the website its own red hair blog too - http://iancookauthor.co.uk/#/blog/4557830424.

The blog mentions that the artist Paul Gauguin featured red-haired natives in his Tahiti paintings. Something I wasn’t aware of until I read it. There’s a good picture of one of the paintings on the blog. Along with some striking images of red-haired mummies.

[No doubt I’ll be keeping an eye on the blog, as there’ll probably be plenty of stuff I can thieve, magpie-like, to fuel my own nefarious interests!]

Redhead - Ian Cook

I’ve just finished reading a book called Redhead by Ian Cook. As the title suggests the focus is red hair and people with it. It was really good. Very esoteric and full of information about red hair. A lot of it I wasn’t aware of.

The book’s a fictional thriller and begins with a journalistic investigation into the ritual murder of redheads that’s started taking place around the globe. Redheaded journalist Rebecca Burns is both the investigator and the focal point of these strange happenings and her journey takes her to North Africa, Easter Island and eventually to the Neolithic monuments of Scotland.

The book was excellent and I fully recommend it. Especially to anyone interested in red hair.

Given the supernatural, historic (I should have mentioned earlier that the book implicates Cleopatra, Seth and Horus, and ancient Egypt in the redhead story) and scientific themes of the book I’ll be interested to see how it’s received. I mentioned in one of my previous posts about the modern mythologizing of red hair. I can’t help but feel that this is continuing apace and this book seems to have caught the zeitgeist pretty well. In fact, it might end up being a case of life mirroring art (hopefully without the human sacrifice bit though!). I hope this book ends up being widely read. It’ll be fascinating to see if people start borrowing from it and blurring the line between life and fiction - a la the whole Da Vinci Code/Mary Magdalene thing.