The story meanders from one character to another, chronicling the trials and tribulations of their daily lives, avoiding the high drama of most books but weaving a fascinating tale of everyday Scottish folk. It works because it has some terrific characters:
- Angus the painter whose beloved dog Cyril has been impounded and may be put down for biting.
- Incredibly handsome and vain parasitic Bruce who moves in to the flat of rich heiress Julia. But she plans to entrap him as her husband.
- Bertie the 6 year old stat saxophonist whose life is dominated by his mother Irene who insists that he practises, that he plays with girls, and that he regularly visits his psychotherapist (who looks eerily similar to his new little baby brother Ulysses). Irene (one of the few characters who doesn't have her own voice) also dominates her husband Stuart by the simple technique of fiercely insisting on that which is not true ie that she is always in the right and he is always in the wrong.
- Student Pat and Matthew, the millionaire in whose art gallery she works. Will they, won't they?
- Anthropologist Domenica and her friend and neighbour Antonia who has an affair with her polish builder Markus even though the only English word he can say is 'brick'.
Brilliant or beautiful bits:
- "Perhaps her mind had filled in the rest, filled in the hair with the gel" (p 13)
- "In the interstices of the big things of this world ... were the hidden, small things; the small moments of happiness and fulfilment." (p 33)
- "People fell in love in all sorts of places; anywhere would do - amidst the noise and fumes of the daily world, in grim factories, in the most unpromising of offices, even, it would seem, amongst the din and dirt of roadworks." (p 33)
- "We are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue." (p 42)
- "Some strange English accent; you know how they mutilate the language down there." (p 103)
- "Then all those stories about Edinburgh being full of icy types are false?
- Absolutely, said Angus, frostily." (p 133)
- "Wolf and Bruce were sexy; they dripped with sexual appeal, if one can drip with such a thing. Dripping came into it somewhere" (p 135)
- "The average boy, he knew, had the average mother, and his mother was not that." (p 155)
- "It did not do to think about sex on Heriot Row." (p 174)
- "a city of cultivated, outward respectability beneath which there lay a world of priapic indulgence." (p 174)
- "if you took the middle-class away the city would die ... just as it would if you took away the people who did the hard, thankless jobs, the manual work that was just as important in keeping things going. That ... was why class talk was so utterly pointless: everybody counted." (p 199)
- "There's a hearth from which freedom has been excluded." (p 204)
- "He had endured long periods of being uncluttered, and, on balance, he preferred to be cluttered." (p 268)
- In the middle of a wonderful chapter full of tension in which a female student is entertained for afternoon tea by a lecturer and his wife, who seem weird in that they are so refined and so normal and so nice, so that you are constantly expecting something dreadful to happen, as the student leaves she meets a boy on the stairs: "She looked into his face, a face full of freckles, and saw that he had grey eyes. For a moment, both stopped, as if they were about to say something to one another, but then the boy looked away and continued up the stairs. Pat felt uneasy. It was as if she had seen a fox." Fabulous!
- "There were plenty of studies on debt bondage patterns elsewhere, but few, if any, on such bondage in urban, Western societies." (p 318)
- "What tyrant has had a happy childhood?" (p 327)
Charming. I think I might be sold. I might have to read the others in the series. August 2017; 329 pages
No comments:
Post a Comment