British novelist and screenwriter, David Nicholls.
I first encountered the work of David Nicholls with Us (2014) late last year. You can read my blog about it here. Starter for Ten (2003) is his first novel and there are many similarities with Us: the first person narrator, here Brian Jackson, like Douglas Peterson in Us, talks to the reader like you’re old friends, but – and here is where Nicholls shines – the hero is really a dork; yes, people call him names, especially his best friends, but you agree with them, Nicholls shows you, more than tells you, what he is really like: loveable but … for an intelligent university undergraduate he is clueless, particularly when it comes to women and himself, and that’s where most of the humour lies.
Brian Jackson has finally got to university and he heads off to engage with knowledge.
I want to know about Plato and Newton, Tolstoy and Bob Dylan; what the words ‘dialectic’ and ‘peripatetic’ mean; I want to know why people actually like jazz …
He is so enthralled with knowledge having been brought up on a diet of TV quiz shows whose list of questions has usually been introduced with the phrase ‘And your starter for ten is…’ i.e, your first question for ten points is … and his father has instilled in him at a very young age that getting it right is the ultimate point to everything.
He wants to join every student club there is but decides on the University Challenge team, well, he doesn’t quite get on the team, he’s given the standby spot. University Challenge is a nation-wide TV quiz show and he’s desperate to find an outlet, a successful outlet, for all that knowledge.
He also wants to be loved and fixes his sights on Alice Harbinson, the prettiest girl he has ever seen. Of course everything gets in his way, study, alcohol, friends, Alice’s parents, Alice, his Mum, and most importantly, his own view of himself – as well as his arms: what do you do with them when you’re sharing a single bed with someone?
It’s a laugh-out loud coming-of-age story, it’s become a Nicholls’ specialty, and framed by his ambition to be in the team for the coming-up new TV series of University Challenge. Yes, he gets places with Alice and yes, he gets on the team but that’s only a taste of the story. No spoilers here.
It’s highly predictable – but some unexpected twists – but entertaining and very funny.
On YouTube you can find an excellentHBO/BBC movie version (in English, you’ll soon get used to the Spanish sub-titles) made in 2006, penned by Nicholls, co-produced by Tom Hanks, with Sam Mendes as an executive producer, directed by Tom Vaughan, and staring James McAvoy, Rebecca Hall, James Condon, and Benedict Cumberbatch.
You can buy the book, and other David Nicholls titles, in various formats here.
I place a lot of importance on the first page of a novel, and William Boyd’s first page of Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009) is a doozy.
It almost made me forget the book I was reading and move quickly on to the second page and the third… and …
Page one is perfectly in tune with the marketing cover design:
…swept along with the thundering narrative tide – Observer.
A thriller of hide and seek among London’s low life. – Tatler
A storm of a story – Daily Mirror
A compelling fugitive chase … – Evening Standard Books of the Year
I can’t remember when I’ve had a more exciting read. – Antonia Fraser
Thrilling, hilarious, intricately plotted and terrifically readable – Craig Raine, TLS Books of the Year;
and the best one saved for the front cover:
A deft combination of suspense and literature. – Stephen King
I was hooked and looked forward eagerly to starting it.
And the opening of the story doesn’t disappoint. A successful and upwardly mobile climatologist, Adam Kindred, goes into a cafe after a very important job interview, a job that could define his career, to wind down. He makes casual conversation with a man at the next table, a man who leaves behind a file. Adam surveys the technically challenging documents and finds a phone number which he rings and arranges to return the file to the man’s hotel room. When he arrives he finds the man on his bed with a knife in his chest. The man demands Adam pulls it out. “Pull it out!” Adam obeys and promptly the man dies leaving Adam with the bloody murder weapon in his own hand – and the murderer out on the balcony. He runs.
He runs and disappears; and it’s the disappearing and the people he discovers on the way that take up the bulk of the novel. This is fascinating but not particularly thrilling, in the sense that a thriller is thrilling. His particular method of disappearing is simple and surprisingly effective. He completely avoids the modern world that is defined by electronics. He doesn’t use his smartphone and he doesn’t use his credit card; the devices that make any human being knowable and traceable.
He is forced to sleep under a bush under a bridge; he is forced to count every penny he has in his pocket and use it wisely, he is forced to eat a seagull; he is forced to beg, and develops an intriguing, if dishonest, but effective method; he is forced to change his appearance – from a clean-shaven man with a head of hair to a bearded baldy; he is forced into a saintly refuge where he garners a new name, new friends, and is taken in by a prostitute called Mhouse – a wonderful literary creation – and her two-year old son, Ly-on whom she drugs as she can’t always afford a baby sitter. Through luck and circumstances of his own making he obtains yet another identity and consolidates that identity with a credit card and a smartphone. He turns into someone else.
Of course the police are after him as well as the murderer and the murderer’s superiors and these characters are equally interesting; but of course, they are after Adam Kindred, a man who no longer exists. There are close-shaves and the stakes are high, but there is also romance and an ending that I won’t go into. No spoilers here.
I have been hearing about William Boyd for some time. He is a playwright, short story writer, screenwriter, and director and the author of highly praised and award winning books; he has been on the Booker Prize list twice and won the Costa Book of the Year in 2006 with his novel Restless; and I also understand why he was chosen by the Ian Fleming estate to write a James Bond novel called Solo which came out in 2013. I get the feeling that Ordinary Thunderstorms is one of his minor works and while I enjoyed it, it’s interesting and entertaining but not accurately reflected by the hype on the cover.
What did someone say once about how not to judge a book?
There are many enjoyable videos of William Boyd on Youtube such as this one: An evening with the Sunday Times bestselling author, recorded at the Duchess Theatre 24 September 2018.
You can find many books by William Boyd, including Ordinary Thunderstorms, in various formats here.
American writer, Jeanine Cummins and her recent book American Dirt.
American Dirt (2020) is a novel about a Mexican mother and her son who are forced to join the hordes of immigrants to try to enter the USA. The controversy around it rests on not just a white woman writing about a brown woman, and a writer who doesn’t understand the plight of ‘the other’, but critics are also questioning her writing skills.
The two sides are simply described by NBC journalist Gwen Aviles:
The novel’s defenders maintain that Jeanine Cummins’ book, released on Jan. 21, is an important narrative confronting a topical issue, U.S. migration from Mexico and Central America. The book has been championed by high-profile celebrities, like Oprah who named it her bookclub pick.
The novel’s critics, however, primarily consisting of Latinos and other people of color, have deemed the book opportunistic and racist and are questioning why Latino authors often don’t receive a similar level of support for their projects, which touch upon similar themes and are written from an insider’s perspective.
This white-privileged use of people of colour and from other cultures as ciphers in novels has been around for hundreds of years: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) are the most famous examples and both spurned novels that ‘wrote back’ to the colonial centre with Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea respectively. The characters: Dickens’ Abel Magwitch, a convict escaped from Botany Bay, and Bronte’s creole and unnamed mad-woman in the attic were used as plot points and not as rounded characters and it took Carey and Rhys to give these characters a voice and their own power and agency. These latter books are part of a literary genre known as Post-Colonial literature.
It’s not that a white writer cannot write about a brown character, it’s that when a white writer does they must do it with an understanding that that brown character has agency, honour, a past, and future. In other words the brown character must be respected.
The publishers of the American Dirt, Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan have cancelled their planned national book tour because of the controversy.
An open letter signed by 138 writers has been sent to Oprah Winfrey asking her to rescind her support for the book. The letter succinctly explains the criticism and you can read it here.
Girl is a first person account of Maryam, a very young girl, who with many others are kidnapped by members of Boko Haram, an ultra extremist sect of Islam in West Africa, although in the text it is only known as The Sect. She escapes, wonders aimlessly in the forest with her baby daughter, is discovered, returned to her mother who doesn’t recognise her. Does she also need to escape her family?
There’s an issue with this book that goes to the heart of what fiction is. O’Brien travelled to Nigeria twice to research this novel. She’s just turned 89. She said …
So one day I was in a waiting room (Doctor’s ) and I read a small item in a newspaper while I was waiting which said: A girl called Amina Something Something was found in Sambisa Forest wondering with her baby with nothing to eat, didn’t know her name and didn’t know where she was. And for some reason that’s inexplicable to me, I thought: I have to write that story. I didn’t think it when I first read about the girls, or when I heard about the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. There was something about the girl alone in a forest that resonated with maybe lived and maybe imagined experience inside me.
The book is difficult to read. Her kidnapping, multiple rapes, witnessing a woman stoned to death, treated like a slave, mistreated and ignored by other women (perhaps the saddest blow), rendered invisible, are described vividly, if not in detail, although the detail she does share is certainly enough. It is confronting to think that human beings can treat other human beings like this. Yet, she was treated like this because she was a girl. Her forced marriage comes almost as a relief. Even her escape with her baby daughter was treacherous, misunderstood, and almost unbelievable, as well as unbelieved. Her reunion with her mother is distressing: they don’t know each other any more.
It is written as fiction – the word fiction implies untruth – yet we are lead to believe that these things actually happened to the girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria in 2014. O’Brien met them, talked to them, heard their stories, wrote them down. And yes, I believe these things did actually happen to those girls, so I suppose, my question is why did she choose the novel form to tell her story? She is a writer of novels so perhaps she thought of no other way.
If you are in any way squeamish about violence, extreme sexual violence, on the page don’t read this book, or if you are, but do, its fiction label may give you some reprieve.
In order to explain the abundance and importance of truth in fiction I have often used the line, Fiction is about truth but to make it clear one has to lie about it a little. This still holds true.
And, yes, as O’Brien admits in her Acknowledgments, Maryam, her creation is an amalgamation of ‘the imaginative voicings of many through one particular visionary girl.’
So yes, this is fiction, Maryam in untrue, but her story is not.
Edna O’Brien’s first, and most (in)famous book, The Country Girls, came out in 1960. She has been a writer all her adult life, but as she says, the first was easy, it had been welling up inside her all her young life, she wrote it in 3 weeks, but each book is harder than the previous one. This one took three years and it may be her last.
If you search for her on YouTube you will find many fascinating interviews. Here’s one from the early 1990s to get you started.
You can find various editions of Girl and her other works here.
British writer, Bernardine Evaristo MBE won the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other.
Even before I started reading, I saw – there were no capital letters, no fullstops and the lines were of different lengths – and my prejudices jumped up and I thought, ‘Oh, poetry.’
But then I started reading – each new sentence, no capital letter, begins on a new line and there is no full stop, just a new line; and the unconventional format didn’t hamper the understanding. It was clear. There is punctuation within each sentence, just not to begin or end them.
Evaristo calls it ‘an experimental novel’ which could refer to its unconventional format on the page or its structure as a book: there is no through-narrative although the lives of some of the characters intersect. In a sense the narrative is Britain itself but not a novelistic narrative that starts on the first page and finishes on the last.
Girl, Woman, Other, as the title implies is about women: Amma, Yazz, Dominique, Bummi, LaTisha, Winsome, along with Carole, Shirley, Penelope, Megan, Hattie and Grace: all British women, mainly black and so all are a consequence of Britain’s colonial past and the book is therefore an example of post-colonial literature which, in a nutshell, is writing that reacts to, usually against, the discourse of colonialism that was seen to perpetuate cultural imperialism.
Primary works in this field were writing against, or back to, colonial texts: Jean Rys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a post-colonial take on Bronte’s Jane Eyre; J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) to Danial DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Patrick White’s Fringe of Leaves (1976) to the popular myth of Eliza Fraser; Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) to the colonial notion of the black man notoriously portrayed in Joyce Carey’s Mr. Johnson. In all of these post-colonial rewrites, the native character – the other – is given power denied them in the original colonial text. For example, the protagonist in Jean Rys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is Antoinette, a creole, and deals with her early life in Jamaica where she is forced into an arranged marriage to an Englishman; Antoinette is the heroine, she has the voice and the power (although not enough, she is a woman), unlike her literary dopplegänger, the un-named mad women in the attic in Bronte’s Jane Eyre – the first wife of Mr. Rochester of Thornfield Hall. Rys gives the mad-woman – a creole – a past, a name, and therefore authority.
Post-colonial writers today are not usually writing back to an existing colonial text*, but Evaristo, and her British contemporaries, Zadie Smith, Andre Levy, et al, are writing back (against) to a cliché-ed perception of what a British person is. They are also writing back to a perception of what a British woman is.
The writing is uncluttered, contemporary, conversational, and unintellectual. However, it has the flavour of journalism. Each woman’s story (and most are interconnected) feels like it was written for an article in a weekend magazine. Prose, and the characters that inhabit it, come to life when they react with each other. There is dialogue here within the prose, unannounced by punctuation but clear, but not much. Fiction works when all three elements, description, narrative and dialogue, are given their full force. This is really my only criticism. Dialogue is the most powerful descriptor of character, but here it is used sparingly, and so I felt some characters are not fully realised. There are some portraits that include intimate detailed scenes and these are the most powerful.
What impressed me was the authorial authority and bravery of writing without the usual writerly conventions: capital letters, full stops. The third person narrative slips easily into the first; the past tense seamlessly into the present without any loss of understandability. The prose has a playful freedom that is refreshing and new. I just would’ve liked to hear the characters talk more.
Evaristo is a self-confessed feminist and has been an anti-racist activist for all of her adult life.
Being the Booker-winning black woman writer in 2019 means that my black British feminist perspective is amplified around the world, and for the first time I am starting to feel heard beyond my community.
However, despite her win and her positive attitude to her win her feminist and anti-racist struggles continue. In early December 2019 over 190,000 people watched a lazy BBC announcer say ” … the Booker Prize was shared between Margaret Atwood and another author…”; he didn’t even bother to use her name and Evaristo tweeted ‘…How quickly & casually they have removed my name from history – the first black woman to win it. This is what we’ve always been up against, folks’ and started a twitter storm causing the BBC to publicly apologise to Evaristo. The Guardian newspaper also caused a furore over a headline referring to Girl, Woman, Other, Evaristo’s eighth, as ‘obscure.’ The headline was quickly re-written. It might seem trivial to some but it is the day-to-day small moments that perpetuate black people as the ‘other’; like the waitress who assumed Evaristo’s white dining companion would be the one to pick up the bill.
Girl, Woman, Other is a deserving winner of the Booker; it’s co-winner Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, less so. You can read what I thought of that book, here.
You can browse and/or buy Girl, Woman, Other and Evaristo’s other novels here.
*However, in 2015 Algerian author, Kamel Daoud, had published The Meursault Investigation, a post-colonial take on Camus’s iconic The Stranger (1942) where the real stranger was refocused as the unnamed Arab that Camus’s protagonist shoots five times on a beach.
These, and other inferences, came from a fellow book worm and one whose opinions as a reader I trust. So, finally, I read Anne Tyler.
Saint Maybe (1991) is typical of her work: family relationships. There seems two kinds of families in the American novel: the apple pie variety and the gun variety. Tyler’s are the former but, of course, coping with a threat, a dilemma.
Ian Bedloe, the son in an apple pie family in Baltimore did something he believes was very bad and caused two deaths. Only he knows what he did, what he said; the only other person, his older brother, who was there when he said it, and to whom he said it, is dead. He is desperate to be allowed to atone for his ‘sin’ and is drawn into a local Christian denomination called TheChurch of the Second Chance. After what he’s done, he so wants to be good. And forgiven.
What interested me in Saint Maybe is the subject of religion. I was brought up in a religious family but the Christianity taught by my Christian denomination (Lutheranism) always seemed to be more like an insurance policy than a belief system. My mother read the bible like a novel. I have come to understand that religion is a very important element in human existence: each group, tribe, and civilisation since the year dot has had a belief system; mainly to answer the big questions (How did we get here? What are we doing here? What’s that big ball of fire in the sky? and There’s got to be something better, doesn’t there?) so we can get on with the everyday necessities: digging for yams, inventing machines, filling in a tax return. What I object to, and what I see as a blight on humanity, is the administration, and interpretation, of these belief systems: the temple, the synagogue, the mosque, the church.
“I believe in the Holy Spirit; the holy Christian Church, the communion of saints …”. So begins the last line of the Apostle’s Creed I learnt as a child, yet all three, the holy spirit, church, and saints are inventions of the (all male) administrators of Christianity over millennia.
The Church of the Second Chance is exactly one of these ‘administrations’; it teachers not so much what Jesus Christ said but what its leader, Reverend Emmett, says and Ian, so looking for a path to redemption and his second chance for what he has done, joins Emmett and his small flock, waiting, as the Reverend Emmett says, for a sign that he has been forgiven.
The Bedloes aren’t religious but Ian’s commitment to The Church of the Second Chance slowly pulls them in; ritual and routine can do that to people’s lives. The family conforms to the Church more out of respect for Ian than for a commitment to its beliefs.
Stream-of-consciousness is a novelistic technique (thank you James Joyce) that recently has had a revival: Anna Burn’s The Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize and Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker. It usually is associated with internal thoughts, the ordinary, the minutiae of people’s lives. Here, Tyler uses the more common third-person narrator to tell the very plain story of Ian Bedloe.
Above her work-desk is the following quote.
As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there,
Or a general raises his hand and is given the field glasses,
Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.
Something will come to you.
…from Walking to Sleep by Richard Wilbur.
“I see those words as about getting an idea and making a book,” says Tyler. “I don’t get anxious. It will come to you, let it come in.”
She works in long hand, rewrites in long hand, and only when she is satisfied will she then type it onto a computer; print it out and work on another draft in long hand. And so it goes. Her style, if she has one – she says she has no style at all – is “unmistakably hers: transparent and alert to all the nuances of the seemingly ordinary,” wrote Charles McGrath in a 2018 profile in The New York Times.
It’s true that the appearance of truth in fiction is achieved through detail which is why her writing is so believable: her work is full of detail, to the brim with detail: the weather, the light on window glass, a tone of voice, a look, the type of cut and grain of wood, what people know and don’t know; but she also deliberately omits detail, for the reader to work out. This also, ironically, adds veracity to the work; creates an investment for the reader in the story and its meaning. She is a joy to read.
Saint Maybe was filmed for television in 1998 starring Blythe Danner and Tom McCarthy, directed by Michael Pressman from a teleplay by Robert W. Lenski.
The first plot points give intensely conflicting actions, like a wife expressing deep love for her husband, then a day later she is discovered with a gun in her hand and her husband tied to a chair with five shots into his face, his blood mixed with hers as it drips from her slashed wrists, but she stands comatosed, but alive, and refuses to speak.
Then the first person narrator, an authoritative figure like a lawyer, doctor, or detective tries to get the woman to speak and is determined to solve the seemingly unsolvable mystery. There are no witnesses and the case seems cut and dried. He, and increasingly she these days, talks to people involved with the woman, and/or her journal, or long lost sister / lover / colleague, is discovered and details emerge about her history, her marriage, her family, her work colleagues which intermingle simultaneously with details of the narrator’s history, marriage, family, and work colleagues until a complicated web of possible motives, secrets, jealousies, and, of course, red herrings swim around your brain leading you to think, at various moments, ‘Oh, I know who did it!’ and then you are encouraged more in your beliefs and then suddenly they are dashed, or seemingly dashed, onto the rocks of evidence, only to emerge later as indeed a possibility, but maybe not.
Sometimes you are right and you’re left with a scraggy feeling of disappointment causing you to discard the book after ‘the end’, if you get that far, and to search for a different thriller writer.
Sometimes you are wrong and rarely, very rarely, you are hit over the head with the truth at the very moment of reading it, and you gasp.
The Silent Patient is one of those.
Alex Michaelides is a screenwriter of Greek-Cypriot/English extraction and lives in London. This is his first novel.
Adding to this mix of intrigue, and as a source of clues, are photo-realistic paintings – the woman, Alicia Berenson, is an artist; a Greek tragedy of love and resurrection by Euripides, Alcestis – the name of a Berenson self-portrait; and a secure psychiatric facility, The Grove, where our first-person narrator, Theo Faber, works and where Alicia is incarcerated.
At times the writing feels formulaic but it is, after all, a ‘No.1 New York Times Bestseller’ so you are warned. The film rights have been snapped up by Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, as part of its next three year plan and is currently listed as ‘in development’.
I rarely read thrillers – generally, I don’t care who did it – but this one kept me reading and what I love about this book is that the very way it’s written is a clue to, not who did it, but what caused it to be done, and that it is not a simple first-person narrative: when you’ve read it you realise that what you’ve read is only possible because you’ve read it. Enough said. No spoilers here.
The language is simple and direct and the pages are very easily turned. I read this in two afternoons. It’s the perfect airport novel, great escapism, entertaining, and Mr. Michaelides is grinning all the way to the good life. Smart Alex!
Yes, this is a sequel to The HandMaid’s Tale (1985) but it is not a continuation of the story. The Testaments starts fifteen years after the story of Offred, the handmaid, and is a trio of narratives, the three (written) testaments: a young girl raised in Canada, a young girl raised in Gilead, and Aunt Lydia, the villainous trainer ‘Aunt’ in the original story; she is the only continuing character.
There was a 1990 movie of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and Elizabeth McGovern, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and penned by Harold Pinter which was not a success (it only made 5 million back on its 13 million budget) but the television (streaming) version of the book which first aired in 2017 was a runaway success. Timing is everything, coming as it did in the wake of the #metoo movement.
I suspect it was the success of the television version that sparked Atwood, and/or her publishers, to embark on a ‘sequel’.
In a 2018 ad for Masterclass – an online teaching platform that Atwood signed up to teach creative writing – she says that all the bad things in The Handmaid’s Tale happened “in real life somewhere at some time … I didn’t make them up.” She also says that “as a writer, your goal is to keep your reader believing in your story even though both of you know it’s fiction.” I always knew The Testaments was fiction; I didn’t believe a word of it.
There are three reasons why I think this is not a good book and the Booker Prize judges made a very big mistake.
Fiction is made up of three components: narrative, description, and dialogue. The Testaments is all narrative. This happened, then that happened, then this happened, with dialogue peppered through the narrative like herbs sprinkled on a salad. You don’t learn much from the dialogue. There is very little description. I suspect Atwood believed the images, the ‘look’ of the story and characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV version, would satisfy the reader’s need to ‘see’ it.
So much of the detail of the times and life in Gilead are justified in the same sentence in which the detail is introduced. This is often necessary but it is a necessity that should only be used sparingly. Too much of it and it sounds lazy and clunky. We are told too much, when we should be shown. As a reader I had to ‘do’ virtually nothing. I fell asleep a lot.
And what I believe to be the greatest sin: when the story is one of survival and escape from an evil or severe danger, which it is, we do not see the villains, the bad-guys – Commander Judd et al – get their comeuppance. It is a very unsatisfying read.
The Booker judges decided on a winner for 2019, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and why, of why, did they also announce Atwood’s book as a co-winner – it’s against the Booker rules, btw – when it is such an obviously commercial enterprise capitalising, not on the success of the 24-year-old original book but, on the 2017 TV version of that book? Maybe they thought the Booker needed the publicity. Atwood didn’t need a Booker; she already had one (for her 10th novel, The Blind Assassin, in 2000) where as Evaristo did, but then had it diminished by having to share it. Both author’s were kind and sanguine about their joint prize as one would expect.
If you enjoyed all or either of the versions of The Handmaid’s Tale, book, film, or TV series, leave this one alone: it adds nothing.
However, you can buy various editions of The Testamentshere.
British novelist and screenwriter, David Nicholls.
I love this book. It’s rare to find a laugh-out-loud read these days, but this is one of them. It’s a first person narrative of Douglas Petersen, a bio-chemist, and a man who always just seems to miss out on being, cool, mainly because he just doesn’t know what cool is; he doesn’t get most things. That’s certainly what his son, Albie, would say although he probably wouldn’t be so kind. The third component of Us (2014) is Douglas’s wife Connie. She’s an artist and an ex-hippie and is definitely cool. She wakes him up one morning and tells him that she might want to leave him. They embark on a (possible) remedy: a Grand Tour of Europe, and drag a reluctant Albie along with them. This is the Us. This trio. However there is another narrative interspersed with the Grand Tour: how Douglas and Connie got together in the first place; and many more incidents of their life together. You get to know these three very well. It’s really a portrait of a marriage.
It’s divided into many small chapters, 180 in all, which in itself, propels the reading along; ‘I’ll just read the next chapter before I walk the dog’; ‘I’ll read this short one before I start dinner’; ‘Just one more, it’s short, before my afternoon jog.’ And why do you want to do this? Because you love Douglas. He’s a gem and he talks to you as if you’ve known him since kindergarten. Us became my very early morning read when a trip to the loo erased all efforts to go back to sleep. But, so I didn’t wake the sleeping one, I tried to curtail my laugh-out-loud to something like, laugh-in-loud, but stifling a laugh-out-loud made my body behave like a trampoline-in-use and the mattress was forced, of course, to follow suit, so allowing the sleeping one to sleep didn’t work. I was banned from reading Us in bed. But that’s OK; you can get through a short chapter while waiting for the jug to boil, during a TV channel promo, even while stirring the custard.
The key to the humour is Douglas himself. He doesn’t quite know what to say when staring at a painting (I like that blue bit.); he feels inadequate to say what he likes about a piece of music (It’s loud, isn’t it?); and contemporary dance (Do they have to throw themselves against a wall?); and books (Erotic realism? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?); and food (flaccid courgettes in a green-grey water sauce made from water.).
David Nicholls also has several screenwriting credits including Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ for the BBC in 2008, Far from the Madding Crowd in 2015, and he wrote Patrick Melrose (2018), the television series based on the novels by Edward St Aubyn. He has penned several movies including the adaptations of his novels, Starter for Ten, and One Day. He also trained as an actor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama but never quite made it in that field because, as he admitted, he wasn’t very good at the basic stuff, like standing still and moving from A to B. However he must have picked up some performance skills since his appearance at the recent North Cornwall Writer’s Festival had the audience in stitches as he read from his latest book, Sweet Sorrow, a passage devoted to the pitfalls of first-time kissing.
Us is currently being filmed in various location in Europe for the BBC. It stars Tom Hollander and Saskia Reeves with a script by Nicholls. However, a release date has yet to bee announced.
He’s a busy man and novel writing has to be squeezed in between big budget movies and television drams; he’s written five novels, so, for me, four to go.
You can watch an interview with David Nicholls about this book, Us, here.
You can buy the ebook, or other formats, here where you can also ‘look inside’ before you buy.
British writer Patrick Gale lives in Cornwall and plays the cello, modern and baroque.
I first read this book decades ago and then in 2016 I discovered Patrick Gale again with Notes from an Exhibition (2007) and have remained a fan.
Rough Music (2000), like several of Gale’s novels, has a double narrative, same characters, same location, different times.
Julian a small boy, son of simple parents John and Frances, is taken on an idyllic beachside holiday in Cornwall with those parents, John and Francis. The widower, Bill, a writer, and child, Skip, of John’s sister arrive from America and cause passions and the status quo to collide.
Decades later, Julian is a grown man, a successful bookshop owner, and he returns to Cornwall for a holiday with his now ageing parents; his mother with early onset dementia, to the same beach and even, possibly, to the same house. The catalyst of drama and entertainment is that he has been having an affaire with his brother-in-law, Sandy, which began on the evening of Sandy’s buck’s party and has continued through Sandy’s years of happy marriage and the birth of his two sons to Julian’s sister, Poppy, and right up to the action of the story. No one, not Poppy or his parents, know about this. While on this holiday he meets Roly, an artist and drop-out, and he can see a possible exit from this family deception if only he can orchestrate it in time.
Some of the names of these characters change between narratives so don’t be put off by this. All will be revealed.
Each story is told in alternating chapters rendering the climax of both in close proximity to each other. A double whammy for the reader.
Gale is at his best with family relationships and spends time painting them in all their complex layers of expectation, disappointment, and flowering moments of joy. He is a wise writer, or perhaps just acutely observant.
Family life:
The only real difference was children. He had never appreciated until now how much emotional clamour, interference almost, the presence of children set up, saving a relationship from listening to itself.
How children can get in the way:
‘Ma.’ ‘What?’ ‘Leave the door open this time.’ The open door was sobering, like having a dressing-gowned child bearing mutely indignant witness from the room’s corner.
Ageing:
It was as though the only acceptable way to face old age was in a spirit of glassy contemplation and composure, to become a fund of quaint old stories (so long as one did not repeat them too often), a calm old lap on which babies might be placed and an undemanding extra presence at a dining table.
Self awareness:
Perhaps John had been right and her surliness was simply muffled sorrow.
…flirting was a kind of knife sharpening for marriage.
And humour:
Tell me what you’re thinking. Trust me. I’m a novelist.
Sometimes while reading one can feel a ‘little jump’: when you read something that can chip ever so slightly at your suspension of disbelief but for the sake of the story, and your own enjoyment, you accept it, go with it. I think we readers do this a lot. It’s only after you put the book down, days or weeks later or when you’re telling someone about the book, that you may realise that, yes, that something doesn’t quite gel, some plot point or character trait doesn’t quite fit with what has been set up for us to accept. Don’t let this colour your view of the work or the writer adversely. It is caused, I believe, by us readers assuming that the universe of the book is exactly the universe of the reader; but this may not be the case. Of course, some books are written in a universe completely alien to the reader, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings for example, but most books we assume are written in our own universe. As readers we will give ourselves far more enjoyment and commitment if we let the story be what it is and not what we might want it to be, even down to the small details of the narrative and characters.
If you know and like Gale’s work you have probably read this, if not then this, along with A Perfectly Good Man (2012), two of his best, are a good way to begin your Gale adventure.
I continue my quest to read and write about all of Gale’s work and having surmised that it is only during the winter that he writes, in the spring and summer he is far too busy (festivals, garden, cello, cooking …) these seasons give me time to catch up. He is so prolific: two books every three years on average. His last Take Nothing With Youcame out in 2018; I’m expecting a new one next year. No pressure Patrick!
Michael K Freundt 