ANDY GREENHALGH - SPENCER'S LUCK
Andy Greenhalgh
What makes for a good novel? If you find yourself skipping Newsnight to go to bed with it you’re nearly there. And if it’s also funny, witty and imaginative even better.. Another ingredient – a bonus - is when it takes you to new places and alien mores. Spencer’s Luck scores on all counts.
We meet the wry dissolute Spencer on a visit to an old friend , Harry ,in a London hospital where ‘ mainly older white people were cared for by mainly black younger people’. They plunge into a rough exchange of insults, “How am I? How the hell do you think I am? I’m dying you bloody idiot” bellows the invalid as his poor wife Jane at his bedside protests , Harry jokes on ‘”He gave Spencer a wink “I suppose you can say I’m ‘presuming on an ague’s privilege” . Spencer pulls up a chair and reposts with another Shakespearean quote “He died like one who had been studied in his death” It was a game he and Harry had often played. He completed the line, “To throw away the dearest thing he owned as t'were a careless trifle”.
But even now “Spencer wondered why he could not simply show his feelings instead of falling back on the banter that had long been his comfort zone with Harry”.
He knows he will never see his friend again, but still the reserve persists , the bandinage rages on. At Harry’s funeral, Spencer allows his chippy detestation of religion to wreck the service. His planned eulogy turns into a coarse explosive rant at the evils of the Church As the congregation visibly wince ,he presses on compulsively. And in the process rides roughshod of Harry’s widow’s grief and alienates his work colleagues aghast in the pews before him.
Not that things are going well with them either. His mordant not-so-oblique parody of over- administered gobbledegook a lecturer in Higher Education must endure is funny- but short sighted.. Blithely confident in his seniority in the College where he teaches, Spencer makes all the wrong moves , fails to conforrm to the minutiae of management and finds himself , shocked -- and sacked.
With an understandably frustrated estranged wife, who has had quite enough of the roguish role he plays, Spencer’s only real refuge for emotional sustenance is his children – and they find him exasperating. Ironically this is where the fulcrum of this absorbing book balances. After he meets what appears to be the perfect girlfriend, gifted beautiful wealthy, Spencer’s daughter is spotted by a filmmaker and the scene changes . He is the escort on set -a castle in Northumberland. Suddenly we are in a matrix of impossibly selfish and self-centred film crew and directors, . Uneasy, Spencer suspects some kind of plot. His daughter is no longer under his control and the world of film has taken over.
With the wild and beautiful landscape as a backdrop, the detail of what the film world can be like for an unguarded ingénue, and the growing tension between his adored daughter’s safety and her father’s care, this book races ahead. It does actually become unputdownable. With a life-threatening climax on the Holy Island Causeway, a comic novel turns into a threatening mystery with danger all around.
The book is brilliant on the world of the Thespian, both amateur and professional, whilst it manages to explore the bizarre events that have turned a thrilling life chance into a threatening death deal.
The entire story is about the struggle to be oneself as a man in the modern era. Spencer for all his cocky repartee is caught in a desperate race for the life of his child. How he emerges when the people he loves best in the world are under threat and beyond his cynicism and wit, is only part of this absorbing novel.
