CHRISTMAS READING
Spencer’s Risk & Spencer’s Blues
Andy Greenhalgh is an actor, lecturer, blues player and writer. His two linked novels follow the adventures of his hero Spencer, a hapless and sometimes pretty hopeless desperado, as he tries to make his way in a difficult modern world. Spencer is married to a wife he loves and has a son and daughter too young not to miss him when he’s not around – and too often he is not. Spencer is hooked on gambling. The pressure of a constantly disappointed partner, his wife is by turns angry and disappointed in him, and the anguish of knowing how far he is failing his children drives Spencer to escapism – and when the going gets tough - back to the gaming table. All this time, Spencer works as a College Lecturer, deep into his reverence for Shakespeare and full of imaginative ideas of how the literature really matter. Into this mix steps a cluster of students (mostly women, they are on English literature courses) made up of the guiless and the deeply manipulative. Girls of all description are problems for Spencer and when they combine with his gambling exploits, things go from bad to worse. An ill-advised poker game goes horribly wrong and Spencer finds that he is deep in hock to the terrifying Paula Malone, whose interests extend to drug dealing on a massive scale. Time for decisions.I loved this book . Spencer is so at sea - but so sincere you cannot help falling into his anguished schemes hoping he’ll pull through.
And if you enjoyed the world of Spencer Leyton you might plunge into the sequel, Spencer’s Blues. It begins in light hearted style where poor Spencer is shipped off on an academic exchange in Atlanta. “It’s in a vibrant part of the town’” his host tells him on arrival. `’ Vibrant was often a code-word for dangerous.’ thinks our hero. His insticts are spot on. The post is so far from his fantasy of a gated community with lawn-sprinklers and eager literary students who admire his English accent. Spencer is in at the deep end with a shockingly divided college and a community where racism is raw and visceral. The mood goes from casual to grim .Prepare for a much different tone as Spencer falls in love and confronts the kind of violence he had only ever seen on films. It all ends in tears. A tour de force from Andy Greenhalgh and a surprising turn of tone from his hilarious earlier book ,but a work which nonetheless engages the reader wtih its uneexpcted intensity.
To Be a Man
I think most of us are more than aware we live, cautiously, in a world where sex is under interrogation. This has been going on for decades from Shakespeare’s As you Like It to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando but today more self consciously than when Geoffrey Chaucer questioned the sex credentials of his glorious Knight’s page , his blonde ‘lockes long’ and light reedy voice. Titles tend to underscore the effort, to struggle towards gender sanctity. Ali Smith’s ‘ How to Be Both’ criss-crosses the centuries and the sexes and more titles follow in her wake, Caitlin Moran’s ‘ How to be a Woman’ to name but a few, her sequels come out regularly. To Be a Man is a volumne of stories by the acclaimed American writer Nicole Krauss. Its flyleaf claims predictably that the book ‘delves with originality and timeliness into questions of masculinity and violence regret and regeneration and shines a fierce unwavering light on to men and women, and into the uncharted gulfs that lie between them’ ; this describes really, all books ever written, from War and Peace to the Naked Lunch, but with fashionable homage to the modish preoccupation with gender.
Thankfully Nicole Krauss is not about this at all. Not even subliminally. It is a brilliant collection of subtle short stories, every one a cleverly written surprise. Perhaps they are covertly about the roles of men and women but it must be deep undercover. I read the intriguing story ‘I am Asleep but my Heart is Awake` about the visit to a deceased father’s hideaway flat and all the way through I imagined the disgruntled visitor was a youngish man. When I realized it was a woman nothing changed for me except everything. Why had she stayed in the flat for a week with the unknown and unnamed tenant sleeping nearby? What appeared to be normal behaviour as a man was almost aggressively reckless- even defiant – as a young woman. Zusya on the Roof tells the story of a very old man suddenly surprised by his feelings when he holds his newborn grandson, a child he thought he could never relate to. Quirky even comical it leaves the reader both puzzled and moved. Amour is unsurprisingly all about the nature of love. It opens with the words “ I knew her when we were young, then we lost touch for decades until I saw her again in one of the refugee camps’ and the time and location remain a mystery throughout even as we read about a tender love affair which in the end, failed. And all very different ; the opening tale entitled Switzerland tells a of a group of girls at an improvised finishing school in a quiet Swiss town. The girls there are both reckless and restless and soon we realize the Soraya , the exotic Iranian young woman alone for the first time in her life, has a secret life no one could guess at , but that leads to her destruction. Ambitious stories which demand a re-read about people in New York, London Europe and Israel but where “To be a Man’ comes in is still opaque, thankfully.
Trio by William Boyd
He must be one of Britain’s best- loved novelists. Over decades William Boyd’s books have cast a spell over readers. From A Good Man in Africa his famous debut novel, he ranges round the world The New Confessions has his hero travel through two world wars and across the Atlantic and back, Waiting for Sunrise delves back into the late nineteenth century in Paris even as it involves the reader in the almost painful passions of his protagonist. Ordinary Thunderstorms is the most terrifying of his books, a man enmeshed , through no fault of his own, in a murder in London has go on the run . If you haven’t read it, do. Ordinary Thunderstorms provokes so much thought about how anyone can survive underground and incognito in today’s world, it is a breathless read from cover to cover. Restless is compelling in a different way. A fey actor , Lysander, finds sexual fulfillment among the new science of psychoanalysis in the early years of the twentieth century – in Vienna of course.
Trio takes place in Swinging Sixties’ Brighton where a film company are shooting a light inconsequential romantic fantasy – as a cover for another film Burning Leaves which is poised to make the fortunes of one of the characters in the Trio, Talbot, the Alvis driving director who lives a double life as quasi gay, never out of the closet. The book is clever and nuanced on the effect of new liberating legislation on homosexuality plays out in the lives of about half of the characters. Secrets too haunt the life of Elfrida Wing , a novelist who has been ‘blocked’ for ten years and spends the first few chapters in an agonized freeze as she write and re-writes the first lines of her new book about Virginia Woolf ( at that time someone as Boyd cannily notices, was quite overlooked).The third member of the Trio is the young American/Swedish star Annie Viklund. She is entirely new to England but soon attracts the devotion of the film’s leading man Troy. Beautiful Anny has already got in deep enough for an introduction to Troy’s parents in their semi detached in the suburbs of London where she discovers his real name is Nigel. But she loves the worship and the comfort of Troy’s devotion – especially as she is recently divorced from a disturbing Yank who soon appears as an international terrorist.
It is such a fun read, and if you didn’t live through the Sixties, William Boyd’s 1968 is very good. But there is a detachment from the threesome unlike his usual style and I did wonder if it was meant to be comedy, or a blend of drama and melodrama. Unlike his other books but none the less attrctivve for that.
