Humour is a tricky business, especially around serious subjects. Get it right, and you can entertain while inciting rage at injustice. Get it wrong, and you risk becoming the target of rage. So what did I make of these two comic novels? The first set in Blitz-blasted London, the second in contemporary Atlanta, which draws you most and are you able to guess which I’d prefer?
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V for Victory by Lissa Evans
Towards the end of the Second World War, Vee Sedge, ably assisted by her fifteen-year-old nephew, Noel, looks after a houseful of lodgers on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Noel, bright, confident and a competent cook, doesn’t bother with friends or school, being tutored by the lodgers in their specialist areas and filling the gaps with books. Although Vee is different in temperament and education – more anxious and less knowledgeable – they make a strong team.
But they share a secret, and Vee is constantly fretting the authorities will find out. When she witnesses a road accident, and is summoned to court, she is terrified. But it leads to a beautiful friendship – dare she hope romance? – which, unfortunately, drives a wedge between her and Noel. He, meanwhile, is on the verge of his own exciting new relationship, but will it deliver what he hopes?
I loved the dynamics between Noel and Vee, and his disapproval of her potential sexual reawakening just as he’s discovering his own. Like her previous novel, Old Baggage, one of my favourite reads of 2018, the tone is light but with complex and serious undertones. Just as that is a moving tribute to the campaign for women’s suffrage, V for Victory celebrates women’s resilience and bravery on the home front, as well as hinting at what’s lost when the men come home. This is particularly poignantly portrayed in the character of Winnie, an ARP warden managing a small team of men while her husband languishes in a POW camp.
It’s a lovely read, with enviably lively and witty prose, although perhaps at first, amid the quirks of the cast of lodgers, I felt some of the humour came at the expense of story, especially as Lissa Evans does disappointment so brilliantly. V for Victory is published by Doubleday to whom thanks for my advance proof copy.
But they share a secret, and Vee is constantly fretting the authorities will find out. When she witnesses a road accident, and is summoned to court, she is terrified. But it leads to a beautiful friendship – dare she hope romance? – which, unfortunately, drives a wedge between her and Noel. He, meanwhile, is on the verge of his own exciting new relationship, but will it deliver what he hopes?
I loved the dynamics between Noel and Vee, and his disapproval of her potential sexual reawakening just as he’s discovering his own. Like her previous novel, Old Baggage, one of my favourite reads of 2018, the tone is light but with complex and serious undertones. Just as that is a moving tribute to the campaign for women’s suffrage, V for Victory celebrates women’s resilience and bravery on the home front, as well as hinting at what’s lost when the men come home. This is particularly poignantly portrayed in the character of Winnie, an ARP warden managing a small team of men while her husband languishes in a POW camp.
It’s a lovely read, with enviably lively and witty prose, although perhaps at first, amid the quirks of the cast of lodgers, I felt some of the humour came at the expense of story, especially as Lissa Evans does disappointment so brilliantly. V for Victory is published by Doubleday to whom thanks for my advance proof copy.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
The narrator of this peculiar American novel, is definitely not Sidney Poitier, although he comes increasingly to look like him, but he is Not Sidney Poitier, the forename bestowed on him for no apparent reason by his mother, a piece of juvenile slapstick which becomes increasingly tedious with each turn of the page. And I’m pretty sure that even before the murder of George Floyd, I’d have felt the same anxiety – rather than amusement – when Not Sidney is jailed and chained in Atlanta for driving a car while black. (He is, however, underage, which makes his seduction by his history teacher a couple of weeks previously equally unfunny.)
 | But I persisted! Partly because the alternative – Doris Lessing’s Love, Again for my book group was even more tedious – and I have to say that Not Sidney’s second arrest for being black was mildly amusing, with the ridicule directed at the police where it belongs. |
Before we get to that there are a few scenes at college where he’s befriended by a garbage-spouting professor by the name of Percival Everett. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems it’s predominantly male authors who place a version of themselves in their fiction.) I actually enjoyed his visit to his girlfriend’s family for Thanksgiving – presumably a parody of the only Sidney Poitier film I remember, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? – who, with their arguments against affirmative action and blatant colourism could be candidates for the Ku Klux Klan (if they weren’t black).
There’s also stuff about an American TV show I’ve never heard of and Bill Cosby mockery that passed me by – I know who he is but little of his trajectory from fame to infamy. More readily available in the US, it was recently published by small UK independent press Influx, from whom I purchased my paperback copy. For a more enthusiastic review, check out A Life in Books.
There’s also stuff about an American TV show I’ve never heard of and Bill Cosby mockery that passed me by – I know who he is but little of his trajectory from fame to infamy. More readily available in the US, it was recently published by small UK independent press Influx, from whom I purchased my paperback copy. For a more enthusiastic review, check out A Life in Books.
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