Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
It's December 24th, 1999. Byron Easy, a poverty-stricken poet, half-drunk and suicidal, sits on a train at King's Cross Station waiting to depart. In his lap is a backpack containing his remaining worldly goods--an empty wine bottle, a few books, a handful of crumpled banknotes. As the journey commences, he conjures memories (both painful and euphoric) of the recent past, of his rollercoaster London life, and, most distressingly, of Mandy--his half-Spanish Amazonian wife--in an attempt to make sense of his terrible--and ordinary--predicament.
What has led him to this point? Where are his friends, his family, his wife? What has happened to his dreams? And what disturbing plan awaits him at the end of his journey?
Byron Easy is an epic, baroque, sprawling masterpiece of a novel--a unique portrait of love and marriage, of the flux of memory, and of England in the dying days of the twentieth century from a young British writer of exceptional promise.
Rezensionen (6)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
This ambitious debut from an English musician turned writer is linguistically inventive and undeniably clever, but the novel, about a failed poet in the aftermath of a failed relationship, is overwrought and overwritten. The poet, Byron Easy, has never had it easy, but he has definitely hit bottom when the novel opens on Christmas Eve of 1999 in a London train station. He is returning to his mother and Leeds, much the worse for wear, "a penniless loser" and reeling from his disastrous marriage to Mandy. The journey through England gives Easy the chance to ruminate on the hellishness of contemporary life (which is to say: the hellishness of his own existence), and provides Cook a frame for Easy's backstory, from his dysfunctional family and childhood to the trials and tribulations of making it in London. But the bulk of the narrative is devoted to the agonies inflicted on him by Mandy, one of the most accomplished shrews in the history of literature. Mandy is unspeakably horrific: manipulative and petulant, cruel and abusive. It's hard to find any reason to like her, which makes it hard to feel much sympathy for the narrator, though Cook goes to great lengths-too great, ultimately, both in terms of length and action-to make Easy sympathetic. Cook is funny and perceptive, an over-the-top stylist with an immense vocabulary-but he needs a more credible and engaging plot to put his obvious abilities to work. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
One man's transition from adolescent to adult during a summer by the sea recalls A Month in the Country Benjamin Myers's first novel since his Walter Scott prize-winning The Gallows Pole and switch from tiny indie publisher Bluemoose to Bloomsbury is an unexpectedly touching story of a friendship that conquers the barriers of age, class and gender. Set over a summer in the aftermath of the second world war, the book follows 16-year-old Robert Appleyard as he leaves his Durham colliery village to search for any work that isn't coal mining: "an act of escapology and rebellion". On reaching the east coast, he encounters Dulcie Piper, a woman three times his age who lives alone in a rambling cottage. They form an unlikely but symbiotic relationship, in which he gardens while she provides food, shelter and intellectual sustenance. Dulcie is a lobster-eating, hard-drinking aesthete with a German shepherd called Butler. By turns verbose, eloquent, motherly and foul-mouthed, she might have come from central casting if Myers hadn't given her such a richly imagined past and linguistic register. "Scones without proper cream is a disaster of apocalyptic proportions," she exclaims, and one can sense Myers' relish in bringing her to life. As well as feeding him up, Dulcie encourages Robert to go to university and introduces him to poetry: "mankind's way of saying that we're not entirely alone". In doing so, she reveals she was once the lover of Romy Landau, a tragic German poet. When Robert discovers a manuscript of Romy's final unpublished collection (also called The Offing), it leads Dulcie to a message from beyond the grave. With its narrative relayed in retrospect by Robert, who eventually becomes the writer Dulcie wanted him to be, the book recalls JL Carr's A Month in the Country . Myers's sensitive portrayal of an emotionally mature man looking back at a single life-changing summer is as quietly gripping as Carr's novella. The title, too, is resonant. The offing is "the distant stretch of sea where sky and water merge", and it's a perfect metaphor for invisible transition. As we read, Robert's adolescence and adulthood meet, while he tries to comprehend a worldly and sophisticated woman who embodies fearless independence. The Offing is written with Myers's customary grit and brio, but the moorland chiaroscuro of The Gallows Pole has given way to lucid coastal air. The flinty, flexed, occasionally knotty prose of his other books, with their vernacular authenticity, has become lyrical and Lawrentian. It is a welcome advance, one that sees Myers effortlessly extending his range.
Kirkus-Rezension
A hip, hard-luck Londoner hops aboard a train and ponders how his life derailed. Cook's bulky, witty, but often maddening first novel opens with some high drama: It's Christmas Eve 1999, and the titular hero is very drunk and boarding a train heading to northern England, determined to kill himself once he reaches his destination. But that moment of reckoning is a long way coming: As the train moves forward, his mind casts back across his previous three decades on Earth to excavate the source of his self-hatred. Some of it has to do with his stepfather, who was an abusive horror to Byron and his mother (the depth of that is withheld till the tail-end of the book), his go-nowhere job in a music shop and a flagging nascent career as a poet. In his best moments, Cook describes these personal catastrophes with ready access to the wit and lovelorn-hipster tone that marks Nick Hornby's books, paired with Irvine Welsh's street-wise black humor. The novel's biggest problem, though, is Byron's biggest problem: Mandy, the woman with whom he's just ended a disastrous three-year marriage. She enters the book as the leader of an up-and-coming rock band. But her character eventually becomes a one-note harridan prone to violent rages that leave Byron bruised both emotionally and physically. Cook is wise to have his hero explore the intersection of abuses past and present, but Mandy is so simplistically hair-trigger that Byron's insights tend to read more like a litany of misogynistic complaints. It's easy to keep rooting for Byron by the time he reaches his destination, but it's been an exhausting, repetitive journey. Cook has smarts and observational talent to spare, but this novel needs characters nuanced enough to justify its length.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist-Rezension
Poet wannabe Byron Easy is on a train, leaving London to go home for Christmas in 1999. If only he wasn't seriously hungover and epically depressed. The end of the millennium has delivered the bitter demise of Byron's apocalyptic marriage to a fiendish woman trying to make it as a rock star. As the crammed-full train lurches forward, our nauseous antihero takes out his notebook and begins to record his jaundiced impressions and enumerate his shameful failures. It's a long, slow journey, and Byron, flat broke and unpublished at 30, hence poisoned by self-loathing, rage, and fear, is a wildly prolix narrator, given to gruesome detail, endlessly anatomized emotions, and increasingly horrific confessions, all tempered by mordant humor and shrewd intelligence. Musician and songwriter Cook's audaciously drawn-out first novel about the wreckage of a life sloshes with booze, puke, and piss. Yet it's also ravishing in its evocations of beauty, sexual candor, suspense, and unusual insights into the soul-battering consequences of abuse and violence. Ultimately, Cook's debut gathers force as a rolling and rocking ballad of survival and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
HOW DISGUSTING the British find themselves! Let me rephrase that. If you were to go by the output of a certain strand of young, male British fiction writer, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the main activity of British life is being disgusted by the physical form of oneself and one's fellows. Ian McEwan began a short story noting the peculiar smell asparagus lends the urine ("it suggests sexual activity of some kind between exotic creatures"). Martin Amis spent large parts of his early career detailing his characters' bleeding gums and cracked molars. Will Self's books come so awash in bodily fluids that if you were to throw them against a wall they'd most likely stick. Male self-disgust, rooted in the moist tumult of adolescence, and extended into one's 20s and 30s under cover of literary careers aping the clinical imperturbability of Nabokov and Joyce, has almost bequeathed us its own genre. We might call it, in the manner of those outraged letters to British broadsheets, "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells." And now we have Byron Easy, the young hero of Jude Cook's first novel, sandwiched between the "Hogarthian mob" of an intercity train bearing him from the acrid underpasses and "haggard" pigeons of "sewery ... London" toward his hometown in the north of England. Byron is a poet of the self-published and permanently wine-stained variety, his single claim to fame being a pamphlet of verse entitled "Hours of Endlessness." In flight from a collapsed marriage, he busies himself with an unforgiving inventory of his fellow passengers (those "hawkers, tutters, scratchers, groaners, verbal diarrheics, carol-hummers, dribblers, tongue-lollers") before zeroing in on a subject much closer to home - his estranged wife, his hatred of whom is to power the engine of Cook's 500-page comic novel, "Byron Easy." That's a lot of pages and a lot of hatred, but Mandy is some wife, "demanding, infuriating, instigating, inspiring" - less woman than weather condition, Hurricane Mandy. From the moment she first walked into the music shop where he works, bear- ing a busted amp in need of repair, Byron had her down as "a self-loather, an attention seeker, an hysteric, a sympathy junkie and expert manipulator." But, he adds, "What can you do when you get on like an oil rig on fire?" A day trip to Brighton elicits a spontaneous proposal of marriage. A visit to a nightclub on the eve of their wedding prompts a spontaneous attack with a glass tumbler. In and out of the emergency room for injuries both real and imagined, Byron and Mandy soon find their marriage devolving into a round-the-clock screaming match, set against the penurious backdrop of North and East London, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in bedsitland. Bad marriages can make for great fiction - look at "Madame Bovary" or "My Life as a Man" - although the trick, as Philip Roth realized, is an all-leveling honesty that spares the injured party nothing. Cook's central character is consumed by self-hatred, which is not the same thing. A frazzled "car wreck of doomy neuroses and nightly death-dreams," avoiding therapy like the plague, he spends much time sunk in lament for his terrible teeth and balding head, faults traversed and retraversed with Amisian reiteration - "a mouthful of spit, a gobful of gob," "that dome of shameful retreat, that Dunkirk of the follicles." We even get a dose of "millennial panic," still loitering like a 14-year-late party pooper. Cook can clearly write but he can also overwrite, in prose studded with literary name-drops and triple-word-score winners ("serpiginous," "barratrous"). Comparing the sound of dogs shagging to a "small baby being murdered with a kebab scimitar" is a wicked visual, but does that scimitar significantly alter the sound that murdered baby makes? Providing a much-needed break are the softer passages detailing Byron's childhood, an Eden of warm Edwardiana rudely shattered by the intrusion of a small-town Casanova into his parents' marital bed The overturned tables of that marriage soon merge with the chaos of Byron's own, a parallel Cook doesn't quite know what to do with, wedded as he is to maintaining Byron's self-image as a doormat. "That's what you get for surrounding yourself with unscrupulous, coercive, flagrant, equivocal, no-good people," he concludes. It's wan, unconvincing stuff and the reader soon tires of it. The other characters soon tire of it. "Admit it, Bry," says his drinking buddy after yet another pasting at the hands of Mandy. "You get a kick when you go over this stuff with me." "Maybe, but I stand by the legitimacy of feeling my own pain till I die," Byron responds, reiterating his opposition to the empowerments of therapy. "Good for you if you've mastered your own anguish." This is certainly bold, a proud flourish of anti-wisdom, within 100 pages of the finish line. Cook has written something new: a bildungsroman that refuses to bilden. No Damascan flashes, Eureka moments or slow, soft dawns of realization await Byron, who quotes Coleridge until he's blue in the face rather than confront the most basic of facts about marriage: It involves two consenting adults. If Cook had really wanted to keep Byron's vituperation intact, he should have read Kingsley Amis, not Martin, and filleted Mandy in a brisk, sharp 200 pages. One hopes that next time he'll cut back on the cleverness - an overrated quality in a novelist - and seek out the ley lines undergirding his fiction. The good news is, they are there. The hero's estranged wife is less a woman than a weather condition: Hurricane Mandy. TOM SHONE'S "Scorsese: A Retrospective" will be published this fall.
Library Journal-Rezension
Can you handle 500 pages of clever complaining? How about if the narrator is a British minor poet, likely drunk, and on a train back to his mother's house with all his worldly possessions? He mostly wants to tell us how awful his wife, Mandy, was and is. Even if you have patience with young men complaining about women, the overexcited vocabulary here can get tiresome: "There were bookshelves of erudite criticism, Expressionist prints on the walls, scripts cracked open on stolen university armchairs, racks of fine wine, the Telegraph crossword done as a flat on a Sunday morning, and (the really impressive thing) real Sumatran filter coffee." The childhood remembrances are a bit easier. Cumulatively, however, there's a tonal difference in the novel that makes it fall short of both the winning charm of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and the grotesque lovesickness of a Humbert Humbert. Verdict If this debut novel were half the size, or twice as humane (or even crueler), then this reviewer could recommend it. Now, however, he'd move to the other side of the train to get away from the ranting.-Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., Gainesville, FL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.