Solpadol II continues the Broken Polemic with humanity at its core; humanity and its desperate, aching need for love and for poetry and for all the things in between. But there is no poetry in small-town England, save the poetics we dig from our own souls.
Solpadol II returns us to the world of minor drugs, drink and broken hearts that characterise Carey's universe. The protagonist, holding down a steady job, struggles to balance everything at once – his drinking, his hidden drugs, his love of poetry, his failure to become anything like the reflections he sees in the mirror and the woman who shadows his waking moments and has become his world.
No narrative here, just the failures of the character and his creator; just their joint dependency on a hundred things, on each other and on nothing at all.