I never thought there would be a day when I gave a novel by Rose Tremain two stars. I enjoyed all her last ten books but I thought that this one was a bit of a mess. There seemed to be too many competing stories, those in Borneo I found particularly boring. (This is despite my father being there during WW2 and having to be shipped home having contracted malaria). Don't get me wrong, there are patches of the brilliant writing that have always drawn me to her previous novels. There were just not enough to keep my interest.
The prose seemed to be purposely formal at times, but fails to capture nineteenth century Bath and London. If Tremain had concentrated more on the two main female characters and cut out all the stuff in Borneo (which seemed like extracts from a completely different book) this could have made a big difference. The men all seemed like caricatures, and there are even new characters introduced near the end.
However, there were those sections about Jane and Clorinda that were fine. It's just that when they weren't there I struggled to keep going. I would not advise anyone to avoid the book, it's just that by cutting out a third, it would have been great.
I find it's always a risk backtracking to an author's first novel. I should not have worried. Graham Swift is one of my favourite writers and this, his first work from 1980 is one of his best. There were so many parts that took me back to my youth. Even near the beginning, when Willy Chapman's shop is also a newsagents in the 1960's, paper boys started at 6.30 am "riding off with their sacks of newspapers, pedalling their bikes to the appointed streets". That was me. The author describes Willy marking up the papers, each one had the address written on the front. We soon knew the route and where to stop at each house.
The story takes us back and forth through different periods of Willy's life. Here we are post second world war, ration books, bomb sites, shortages, third pints of milk at school.. I knew them all. Then things get better, more in the shops, early TV, bubble gum machines outside his shop, coffee bars and jukeboxes. All so familiar.
Willy' s wife and daughter are there, not the happiest of families, but is that what Willy deserves? Or endures? Graham Swift describes this small life in tones of vivid grey. Even very early we get a taste of the older Willy: "sooner or later, you do something for the last time. And then it becomes some kind of victory". The last passages are a little depressing but are completely true to the story. I agreed so much with the kirkusreviews of this book which concludes "Full of more emotion and with less surface gloss than the later books, The Sweet Shop Owner is richly rewarding".
Set in Brighton in 1968, just the time when I was finishing college there. The trio of main characters are Anny, the American star of the movie being filmed there, Talbot, the older producer and Elfrida, the wife of the director. Their stories are told in alternating chapters as each one has secrets that start to surface. Intricately plotted, witty and never dull, William Boyd never fails to deliver. There are many other wonderful characters, some actually real as is Boyd's habit, such as Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia. Enough said.
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