You will recall 1989 as the year of the fatwa against
Salman Rushdie and the
death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Perhaps you remember
where you were when
you heard about the Exxon Mobil disaster or the
debilitating stroke of
playwright Phillip Prys.
If you're feeling a bit guilty about not remembering that
last, don't worry. It's
not that you've forgotten or worse, that you simply
weren't paying attention to
the torrent of news in the first place (though you could
be forgiven if you were).
It's because Phillip Prys is fictional, a character in
Kate Clanchy's new novel,
MEETING THE ENGLISH.
Against the backdrop of such major tears in the social
fabric, the world hardly
ripples at news of the Welsh writer's stroke. He was
prominent, to be sure, in
the 60s, and he's managed to get his play, The Pit and its
Men, taught in a
handful of secondary school English classes. But this is
1989. A cusp year, a
terrible news year, a year just before the Internet, and
Prys' plays were kind of
misogynistic anyway. I mean, The Pit and its Men? Writing
about the coal-
soaked victims of industrialization is so Beat Generation
-- best minds destroyed
and all that. Much sexier these days, the last of this
decade, to read Rushdie's
work -- "One Hundred Years of Buggery and Midnight's
Arses," as Prys grumbles
just before the tumor lodges in his brain.
Those closest to Prys can hardly be bothered. His fourth
and current wife,
Shirin, must focus on her opening. An Iranian ex-pat with
lovely hair and small
feet, Shirin is a painter of post-modern miniatures. Prys'
second wife and
mother of his children, Myfanwy is only concerned with
securing Prys' money.
Jake, their son, is an attractive budding playwright but
blows his chances on
blow, and his sister, Juliet, bears 20 extra pounds and
her father's
disappointment that she hasn't lived up to her namesake.
Unsurprisingly, such flawed (but dynamic, carefully
crafted) characters, when
faced with a near-vegetative, kind-of-famous playwright,
decide to place an ad
for live-in help. In Cuik, Scotland, an eager young
English teacher presses the
ad into the hands of his most promising student, Struan
Robertson, who
realizes Cuik's closed mines and closed minds aren't
offering much. He applies
and gets the job.
Clanchy's main concern here, as the title implies, are her
characters. She pushes
them up against each other and against the year's current
events as butterflies
on a corkboard. The result is beautiful, colorful, so
precise. Good characters
interest us. Great characters surprise us, and these
characters do. As they
muddle through their liminal year Clanchy considers gender
dynamics in the art
world, eating disorders, what it means to care for
someone, greed, decay and
so much else. She stays true to the rhythms of everyday
life and the strange,
often conflicting motivations of real people. MEETING THE
ENGLISH is a lovely book. You meet the
English, you meet yourself.
In response to a job advertisement, Struan Robertson,
orphan, genius, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native
town in Scotland, and arrives in London in the freakishly
hot summer of 1989. His job, he finds, is to care for
playwright and one-time literary star Phillip Prys,
dumbfounded and paralyzed by a massive stroke, because,
though two teenage children, two wives, and a literary
agent
all rattle 'round Phillip's large house, they are each too
busy with their peculiar obsessions to do it themselves.
As
the city bakes, Struan finds himself tangled in a
midsummer's dream of mistaken identity, giddying property
prices, wild swimming, and overwhelming passions. For
everyone, it is to be a life-changing summer.
Meeting the English is a bright book about dark subjects--
a
tale about kindness and its limits, told with love. Spiked
with witty dialogue and jostling with gleeful, zesty
characters, it is a glorious debut novel from an acclaimed
writer of poetry, non-fiction, and short stories.
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