Kate Clanchy - Meeting The English

Rating: 3/5

Review: Good in parts...

This book has some good things about it, but as a whole novel I found it unsatisfactory. Kate Clanchy is a fine poet and a very good writer of short stories but this, her first full-length novel, isn't of the same quality.

It is a character-driven story set in 1989, the tale of a very bright, but unworldly 17-year-old from a small run-down Scottish town who comes to Hampstead after taking his Higher Exams to care for an ageing, once-lionised playwright who has had a major stroke. There isn't a lot of plot per se, but there's plenty of interplay between the characters as changed circumstances and the outsider in their midst cause them all to interact, change and mature. Clanchy writes well in a gently ironic tone, she sets the period convincingly and she is extremely deft at conjuring characters and attitudes in a few telling phrases - an essential attribute for a poet and short-story-writer, of course.

I like a good novel of character. I was in something of a minority in thinking that Sadie Jones's The Unexpected Guests and Mark Haddon's The Red House were both excellent. Here, however, Clanchy gives us some pretty crude stereotypes, almost all thoroughly self-centred and self-regarding: the obnoxious, fading Literary Figure; his once-beautiful, grasping, property developer wife; the shallow, arrogant son at Oxford with theatrical pretensions; the intellectual who lives for a few months in a small working-class town and then smugly tells its people and the rest of the world what is wrong with them...and so on. It all felt very tired, and I really am not sure we need yet another novel satirizing the Hampstead literati.

The book did have its memorable flashes of insight, like the nice man who, "when he's being nice, he's always in there thinking how nice he's being," for example. For me, though, there's not enough to sustain a whole book and the ending where everyone learns their little Life Lesson felt false and saccharine. I'm afraid I can only give this a very qualified recommendation.