Two posts in one day: perhaps armeggedon really is nigh...
And so Paul Torday's new tome has glided serenely in literary radar. Old Paul's on a bit of a roll at the moment with his novel Salmon Fishing in Yemen being released as a movie in a few weeks time, starring one Ewan McGregor no less. So perhaps now is his time, as 'Hartlepool Hall' hits the shops with very convenient scheduling.
Now then there’s no getting away from the fact that this is an elegantly written book. I’ve never read any Torday before and his prose is a delight; easy but not banal, gently evocative and succinct. As such this book is pleasurable to digest- rather like a like a toasted marshmallow- and I am sure once anybody starts reading this book, they will effortlessly make it to the end.
But here’s the rub: at the end of it, I felt strangely empty. Although it had hardly been an un-enjoyable experience, I still couldn’t shake off a nagging feeling of, well okay so that was it, but… so what? In fact to be honest, I began to realise early in the book the only real kick I was getting out of it was its location [and trying to work out exactly where Hartlepool Hall was]; now as more attentive readers will know, I was born and bred in Darlington which is the area this book is set in, and lived in Shildon for a while, and so was amused to find in this book, it has been bequeathed an Earl no less!
Ed [Simmonds] Hartlepool is the last in a line of a North-Eastern aristocratic family, whose earlier generations had made a fortune from the industrial revolution. In fact they’d made so much from coal, iron and steel, that the next few generations effectively didn’t have to let a single thought of a day’s work trouble their pampered brows.
Times have however changed and Ed, exiled in France for five years for tax reasons after his father’s death, returns to find the estate effectively bankrupt. His father had basically spent all the money over the years, and Ed- although continually warned during his time in France by the estate manager of its perilous situation- had remained resolutely ignorant of it all by a lifelong commitment to never opening letters and, if he did, generally losing interest in their contents after the first few lines. Admirable as this louche attitude to correspondence may be, it had left him in a bit of a fix so far as his inheritance was concerned.
What follows on his return however is an encounter with a banally, stereotypical cast of characters. There’s Annabel, a contemporaneous, batty thirty-something woman friend with the equally stereotypical, crazed retired Army colonel father she has to look after, and who has of course romantic designs on Ed which he has no inclination to return. Then there is the brusque estate manager who is in cahoots with the brash, ‘new money’ property developer who is also Annabel’s boyfriend and, who- in true post-Thatcher neoliberal fashion- turns over his business on a knife edge by juggling huge levels of debt and, as such, actually hasn’t any real assets at all, and who sees the now bankrupt Hartlepool Hall as a veritable conversion cash cow full of potential executive apartments. Bringing up the rear there is also the predictable cast of support actors- the doddery, eighty-something butler, the honest-to-goodness cook, the salt-of-the-earth estate tenants- they fill the book so completely and with such predictable shape and actions that you soon feel as if you are firmly amongst old familiar literary friends.
It has to be said that it is to Torday’s credit that these characters are well written enough for you not to throw the book away in boredom at the predictability of it all, but it does add inexorably to the overall feeling that it is a story that we’ve all read [and seen on the screen] many times before.
Anyway the ‘wildcard’ in the cast is Alice; an enigmatic older woman who Ed, on his return from France, finds shacked up in the Hall. As he gets to know her better, she does add an interesting dimension to the tale that if again not exactly original in its nature, remains central to it all and provides some much needed substance to the proceedings.
Strangely enough though to my mind it is Ed, the dreamy old fashioned aristocrat now well and truly out of time and place at the beginning of the 21st century, who is the most likable and interesting personality of the lot, and I for one would have liked to find out more about his inner workings. But this is not a book to go into such depths of character study; that’s not a direct criticism, because not all successful books have to have a searching, literary depth of enquiry, it’s just that Torday airbrushes over some interesting ideas just a bit too much, a bit too often. Which leads one to ask too many times, what is the novel trying to be? Is it trying to be easy-read, ‘disposable’ contemporary fiction, or a more middle brow attempt to say something about the socio-economic state of the nation in 2012? If it is trying to be the latter- and at various points in the book the clear indications are that it is- then it doesn’t do so with any real depth or flair. And so as such, it falls between too many stools, and instead of ticking too many boxes, ends up ticking none.
Which is all a bit of a shame really, considering how fine a writer Torday is- technically at least. The book though just failed to give an extra-dimension to the story it was telling and the ending- wrapped up in who Alice really is- can be seen a mile off.
I really, honestly wanted to get more out of this novel than at the end of the day it was, to be honest, capable of giving. In fact it is only in the last page and a half that an indication of how good this book could really have been is offered to us; a truly affecting sequence of passages that sounds like Torday actually writing from his heart, rather than satisfying the criteria of a wordcraft module in a writer’s course. It merely in the end though, shows how lacklustre the vast bulk of the preceding work really is.
So, sadly, I put the book down after finishing it feeling neither intellectually stimulated, nor alternatively excited by a good old fashioned pulpy romp. In fact, I felt very little at all; it had all just seemed so hollow and well…pointless. What a shame.
And so Paul Torday's new tome has glided serenely in literary radar. Old Paul's on a bit of a roll at the moment with his novel Salmon Fishing in Yemen being released as a movie in a few weeks time, starring one Ewan McGregor no less. So perhaps now is his time, as 'Hartlepool Hall' hits the shops with very convenient scheduling.
Now then there’s no getting away from the fact that this is an elegantly written book. I’ve never read any Torday before and his prose is a delight; easy but not banal, gently evocative and succinct. As such this book is pleasurable to digest- rather like a like a toasted marshmallow- and I am sure once anybody starts reading this book, they will effortlessly make it to the end.
But here’s the rub: at the end of it, I felt strangely empty. Although it had hardly been an un-enjoyable experience, I still couldn’t shake off a nagging feeling of, well okay so that was it, but… so what? In fact to be honest, I began to realise early in the book the only real kick I was getting out of it was its location [and trying to work out exactly where Hartlepool Hall was]; now as more attentive readers will know, I was born and bred in Darlington which is the area this book is set in, and lived in Shildon for a while, and so was amused to find in this book, it has been bequeathed an Earl no less!
Ed [Simmonds] Hartlepool is the last in a line of a North-Eastern aristocratic family, whose earlier generations had made a fortune from the industrial revolution. In fact they’d made so much from coal, iron and steel, that the next few generations effectively didn’t have to let a single thought of a day’s work trouble their pampered brows.
Times have however changed and Ed, exiled in France for five years for tax reasons after his father’s death, returns to find the estate effectively bankrupt. His father had basically spent all the money over the years, and Ed- although continually warned during his time in France by the estate manager of its perilous situation- had remained resolutely ignorant of it all by a lifelong commitment to never opening letters and, if he did, generally losing interest in their contents after the first few lines. Admirable as this louche attitude to correspondence may be, it had left him in a bit of a fix so far as his inheritance was concerned.
What follows on his return however is an encounter with a banally, stereotypical cast of characters. There’s Annabel, a contemporaneous, batty thirty-something woman friend with the equally stereotypical, crazed retired Army colonel father she has to look after, and who has of course romantic designs on Ed which he has no inclination to return. Then there is the brusque estate manager who is in cahoots with the brash, ‘new money’ property developer who is also Annabel’s boyfriend and, who- in true post-Thatcher neoliberal fashion- turns over his business on a knife edge by juggling huge levels of debt and, as such, actually hasn’t any real assets at all, and who sees the now bankrupt Hartlepool Hall as a veritable conversion cash cow full of potential executive apartments. Bringing up the rear there is also the predictable cast of support actors- the doddery, eighty-something butler, the honest-to-goodness cook, the salt-of-the-earth estate tenants- they fill the book so completely and with such predictable shape and actions that you soon feel as if you are firmly amongst old familiar literary friends.
It has to be said that it is to Torday’s credit that these characters are well written enough for you not to throw the book away in boredom at the predictability of it all, but it does add inexorably to the overall feeling that it is a story that we’ve all read [and seen on the screen] many times before.
Anyway the ‘wildcard’ in the cast is Alice; an enigmatic older woman who Ed, on his return from France, finds shacked up in the Hall. As he gets to know her better, she does add an interesting dimension to the tale that if again not exactly original in its nature, remains central to it all and provides some much needed substance to the proceedings.
Strangely enough though to my mind it is Ed, the dreamy old fashioned aristocrat now well and truly out of time and place at the beginning of the 21st century, who is the most likable and interesting personality of the lot, and I for one would have liked to find out more about his inner workings. But this is not a book to go into such depths of character study; that’s not a direct criticism, because not all successful books have to have a searching, literary depth of enquiry, it’s just that Torday airbrushes over some interesting ideas just a bit too much, a bit too often. Which leads one to ask too many times, what is the novel trying to be? Is it trying to be easy-read, ‘disposable’ contemporary fiction, or a more middle brow attempt to say something about the socio-economic state of the nation in 2012? If it is trying to be the latter- and at various points in the book the clear indications are that it is- then it doesn’t do so with any real depth or flair. And so as such, it falls between too many stools, and instead of ticking too many boxes, ends up ticking none.
Which is all a bit of a shame really, considering how fine a writer Torday is- technically at least. The book though just failed to give an extra-dimension to the story it was telling and the ending- wrapped up in who Alice really is- can be seen a mile off.
I really, honestly wanted to get more out of this novel than at the end of the day it was, to be honest, capable of giving. In fact it is only in the last page and a half that an indication of how good this book could really have been is offered to us; a truly affecting sequence of passages that sounds like Torday actually writing from his heart, rather than satisfying the criteria of a wordcraft module in a writer’s course. It merely in the end though, shows how lacklustre the vast bulk of the preceding work really is.
So, sadly, I put the book down after finishing it feeling neither intellectually stimulated, nor alternatively excited by a good old fashioned pulpy romp. In fact, I felt very little at all; it had all just seemed so hollow and well…pointless. What a shame.
