"Taboo" is an immensely entertaining and witty novel that charts the progress of a hapless modern art student and his dealings with his fellow students and famous art tutor. The book is very compelling, like a who-dunnit, and I read it in a few longish sessions as the plot dragged me in and captured me. To find out who comes out on top, you will need to read to the very end! I am no expert in modern art, but the book makes it easy to enter into the genre: I learned a huge amount about various modern artists and their critics, their work and their students whilst becoming engrossed in the complexities of the story. I would recommend this as a thoroughly enjoyable read that also has an interesting background to learn from.

Taboo follows a hapless art student through a year at a Northern college as he struggles to find an original form of ‘shock art’. The characters are well portrayed & developed, as the plot develops into mystery, & finally mystery & crime descend into farce. A thoroughly enjoyable read!

The contentious subject of modern art, addressed in a novel, could have issued in a brow-beating polemic, with thinly disguised characters taking up the positions we love to hate. Instead what we have, told with humour and irony, is an immersion in the dilemmas that anyone in the contemporary art world might face, told through the story of a vulnerable art student. Taboo is well-written, and carries you along with its relish for language and affectionately drawn characters. That makes it an enjoyable read, but even more it seems authentic, consistent with the kind of art the author believes in. And what sort of art is that? Halliday writes without condemnation of a kind of art he does not like, the merely taboo-breaking logic of nihilistic modernism, which is less to do with making than with a sort of magical nothingness, supported by a whole hinterland of commerce and sponsorship. What he likes (we have to infer, because he does not spell it out) is art that is simply human, flowing from the human heart, not staged, not looking for effects. None of this seems forced, but arises from honesty about the human situation. Art is made by people. At its best it leaps across the person-to-person divide. Art historians may chase after motives and philosophies, but there is nothing like the secret life of the human person as a crucible for work that touches the soul. For whatever reason, a lot of work misses this. But a book like this seems designed to ignite that part of the spirit that is creative, not in the sense of striving or novelty, but as an outflow of our belonging in this world. Culturally, Taboo takes us to places we need to encounter, but more importantly it takes us to parts of ourselves we may not have often visited.