Clare Morrall - The Roundabout Man

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, absorbing novel

I really enjoyed this book. It was very well written and had some very insightful things to say.

The theme of the book is the sometimes tangled relationship between truth and fiction and how that may affect our lives in different ways. The story centres around Quinn, a man now past sixty who grew up in a household very like that of Enid Blyton in which his mother wrote extremely popular children's stories about the fictional exploits of Quinn and his older triplet sisters and created a myth of a cosy, loving family, but who showed her own children very little affection. Quinn has now chosen to escape the fictional self of his mother's books whom everyone thinks they know, living alone and without money in a caravan on a roundabout on an English motorway interchange and surviving on what he can find.

Clare Morrall uses this to explore the way in which the stories we tell about ourselves and others can influence the way we behave and relate to each other, and how they may profoundly influence the course of our lives, and she does it extremely well. In clean, very readable prose she creates very believable, complex characters and paces her story beautifully. There is a fractured timescale as the first person narrative moves between the present and events of the past. Done badly, this can be dreadful, but Morrall has a deft touch and I found the whole book involving and quite gripping. She paints wonderful portraits of growing up in an English literary household in the late 1950s and of modern characters, each subtly subject to their own or Quinn's fictions about them but without this ever becoming laboured, and she gives Quinn a wholly convincing male narrative voice.

I found this book original, absorbing and involving. The characters and what they convey about our lives and relationships will stay with me for a long time, I think. Very warmly recommended.