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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Young men on the offbeat: Septembers by Christopher Prendergast & Glass by Alex Christofi

12/2/2015

4 Comments

 
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Today’s post features two unusual debut novels, both by young men borrowing the voices of other young men struggling to make their way in the modern world. Although these novels are very different, I’ve coupled them because they’re both slightly offbeat first-person accounts of young men trying to do good, with a touch of humour, and, like with The Winter War, the characters are fully rounded through being depicted, not just at play but also, at work.

Matt is a young schoolteacher from Birmingham (UK), sometime boyfriend of Annabel and Franz von Papen (the German chancellor who survived the Night of the Long Knives) obsessive. Although his subject is history, he seems detached from his own background, seemingly having no significant relationships other than those forged within the novel or immediately prior to its opening. Enthusiastic about his topic, there is nevertheless a wide gap between his own concept of his merits as a teacher and that of his employers; some dubious professional choices lead to him eventually being grateful to procure a job defumigating shoes in a bowling alley.

Septembers is not a novel to read for character motivation or sequential plot; Matt drifts aimlessly within a stark urban landscape of senseless acts of violence, particularly perpetrated by young males. As he says, on reporting an assault to the police (p165-6):

He had written it down all wrong. He was trying to look for causality that wasn’t there. We kept going until he had all but blacked out the bigger picture.

Yet Matt himself is always searching for the “bigger picture” and failing to find it or, at least, to hang onto the only picture he has. He buys an expensive map of the world and pins it onto his classroom wall, only to have it defaced by his students. Matt’s alienation was, to me, reminiscent of the work of the existentialist authors John Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, although perhaps I ought to have been more mindful of the harsh realities of life for the current generation of young adults who can no longer expect to attain the comforts and security their parents took for granted.

The bleakness is mitigated by some wry touches of humour, such as in this observation of one of his pupils (p22):

She suffered for her conscience. In another time she might have thrown herself under a horse.

and this on being bombarded with balled-up newspaper by students at the back of the bus on his way to work (p44):

Papen didn’t run from that citadel in Mexico because he was a meek soldier frightened by the sound of gunfire. He ran because he had no jurisdiction in the provinces of Mexico. He also, probably, didn’t have a firearm.

Although I didn’t find this a comfortable read, it was refreshing to come across a young writer eschewing the formulaic to depict an antihero battling his way through a numbing contemporary world and am glad to be able to add Matt to my small collection of fictional teachers. Thanks to Salt publishing my review copy and to Alan Prendergast for bringing it to my attention.

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Perhaps it’s down to his surname, perhaps it stems from a childhood visit to a glass-blower’s workshop, but twenty-two-year-old Günter is enthralled by glass. After supermarket cut-price milk leads to redundancy from his job as a milkman, and following a few weeks dedicated to Wikipedia in an effort to make up for his poor school record, he reinvents himself as a window cleaner. Via his mother’s funeral, he is befriended by Angela Winterbottom, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, who co-opts him into replacing the aircraft warning light atop the spire. This turns Günter into a local celebrity as well as giving him a taste for heights. Then along comes John Blades, morose window-cleaner to the stars, with an invitation to join his small team in London cleaning Western Europe’s tallest skyscraper, the Shard.

Günter is a lovely character, an innocent with nevertheless profound insights into the absurdities of the modern world. For example, after giving up his virginity to supposed psychic, Lieve, he tries to educate himself for their next encounter via internet pornography, eventually concluding (p125):

The problem with crowd-sourcing information was that, once mob rule was established, people were unlikely to speak out against it. I didn’t recognise any of the men’s actions in myself. It seemed to favour violent oral sex. I am too optimistic person to believe that they represented the general approach.

Günter’s world is full of quirky characters like himself and his possible girlfriend, including The Steppenwolf from whom he rents a room, shut away from life in order to write his book, now at the cutting stage (p105):

The book started off very large, about one and a half million words, and for the last fifteen years I have been stripping away the unnecessary. It must be an essential guide to life. Everything necessary, but nothing extraneous.

The gentle comedy of both character and situation reminded me somewhat of the work of Alison Moore, although it did occasionally stray into cartoon territory, such as in the death of his mother apparently from swallowing a fishbone.

Günter’s first-person narrative is bookended by a few paragraphs from Dean Winterbottom. She also passes judgement on Günter’s account via a number of (73) footnotes scattered through the pages. Readers might enjoy these for their witticisms, for example (p115):

On a personal note, I’m not sure how seriously one should take Freud. He was a cocaine addict who wrote papers with titles like ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ or ‘Dreams and Telepathy’, and only became a doctor so he could get married. He was, however, correct that ‘time spent with cats is never wasted’.

or choose to ignore them completely. Unfortunately, I experienced them – along with her initials waving from words like sanDWich – as a distraction from a story I was otherwise enjoying: if I glossed over them, I worried about what I was missing; if I read them I took a little time to settle back into the main text. But it could be that this is the post-modern touch, and I’m in no position to complain with my link-littered posts perhaps just as distracting to some readers.

Thanks to Serpent’s Tail for my review copy.

What do you think of the plight of young men today? Are you tempted by either of these novels?


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
4 Comments
Charli Mills link
12/2/2015 07:53:14 pm

Intrigued by both, although the second one seems like a more interesting read with quirky characters and distracting footnotes (it does seem similar to how we read online). I'd read the first on its merits as a debut novel of a young man, but it does seem uncomfortable and pointless, which is probably the point!

Reply
Annecdotist
13/2/2015 09:06:40 am

Thanks, Charli, I didn't think how the footnotes are like how we read online, to me, it was more reminiscent of an academic paper. Maybe this is the way of the future, novels with footnotes. Problem for me is that I like digressing as a writer a lot more than I do as a reader.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
15/2/2015 10:15:56 pm

I must say I was rather amused when I clicked your Facebook "like" button and up popped the message: "You like young men on the offbeat"! That's a thought that hasn't crossed my mind for a while, if ever, and it's probably not something, as a teacher, I should be advertising!!!!
It is interesting to hear about a couple of new novels by young men, one about a teacher whose life appears to be a bit of a nightmare. I was interested to hear that his opinion of his skills differed somewhat from that of the administration. That can so often be the case!
I won't be adding either to my list of books to read. They are not on the trash pile either, but there's too much else that is more suited to my tastes at the moment.
Footnote: I'm not really keen on footnotes in books, and have only come across them once or twice before in novels. I find them distracting and think that if it's really important it should be in the text (unless simply noting the source). However I do enjoy links in blog posts so I can seek out further reading or information. :)

Reply
Annecdotist
16/2/2015 04:47:24 am

Ha, ha, Norah, perhaps I'll have to take more care in the titles of my posts! Even though you may not have time to read either of these novels, I appreciate your feedback as a teacher on the first. Thanks also for your footnote on footnotes. I think I'm quite conventional in my book reading preferences, as I don't much enjoy embedded emails etc either.

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