Kate Clanchy's tale of a young Scot's immersion in late 1980s literary Hampstead is a comic delight
"Literary giant seeks young man to push bathchair. Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural milieu. Modest wage. Ideal 'gap year' opportunity." Pressed on by his well-meaning English teacher, 17-year-old Struan Robertson, a resident of the Scottish town of Cuik, answers this advert in the London Review of Books by sending off his CV – it's 1989 and CVs are all the rage: "Everyone had one and was sending it somewhere, by fax."
The "literary giant" in question is Philip Prys, author of the play The Pit and Its Men, one of Struan's set texts and "the whole future of English literature as was in 1959". But his "real stories" are out, and Rushdie and Carter's "posh namby-pamby gossamer" is in, not to mention the fact Prys has been left completely incapacitated by a stroke.
Struan arrives in London gobsmacked by the heat and ill-prepared for the bohemian cast of characters that await him: Shirin, the most recent in a long line of Prys's wives, beautiful, exotic and only 26 years old; Myfanwy, one-time 60s sex kitten, now busty and interfering, Prys's second wife and the mother of his two children; Juliet Prys, 16 years old, hopped up on amphetamines and her Jane Fonda workout video; and her brother Jake, the beautiful, sexy rake, recently rusticated from Oxford.
The Prys household is like one big drama workshop, everyone's acting up or acting out, leaving Struan struggling to make sense of the script. What unfolds is a long, hot summer with more than a little Midsummer Night's Dream about it. The gloriously heady heat, high-running tempers and emotions are offset by the cool lightness of Clanchy's prose, shot through with a wonderfully refreshing comedic breeze. Meeting the English is an utter delight.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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