Apr
23
Book Review: This Party's Got To Stop
A recent Guardian article looked at the top tips for writing fiction by a slew of famous wordsmiths. Among the wry, self-congratulatory nuggets of wisdom, the use of adverbs and metaphors got a bashing, the consensus being that if you really had to use them, you had to be very good and even then do so sparingly.
Rupert Thomson is not just very good – he’s very, very good. His unhurried, natural tone and flow strike you as the kind of things novelists must learn on day one of writers’ school yet so few get right. It is the reason he can get away with peppering his pages with similes and descriptive imagery and not sound glib. If there exists a silken metaphor for something, a phrase that makes you say to yourself ‘oh, I can really picture that in my head now’ then expect him to find it, improve it and serve it up. Hemingway he ain’t.
This Party’s Got To Stop is the first non-fiction work by the migrant writer. Thomson has always had a thing for parallel realities, and makes his political and social observations through the veil of these ‘elseworlds’. Here, however, he’s rolled up his sleeves to tackle that most perplexing and dramatic of dimensions – family.
He casts his mind back to the summer of 1984 when, following the death of his semi-invalid father, he returned from Berlin to Eastbourne in the south of England. There, he ended up sharing the family home for seven months with younger brothers Robin and Ralph, and Ralph’s partner Vivian. All in their mid to late twenties, and somehow liberated by the death of their father to properly mourn their long-dead mother, the brothers drank cider, polished off their father’s prescription medicine and generally upset the neighbours.
Strands of memory peel off from this central HQ. We all think our respective families are the maddest in the world, but Thomson may change your opinion on this. You’ve got the stuffy, housebound father who seduces and twice fertilises the young au pair. There’s Ralph and Vivian protecting themselves in the family home with flick knives. And then there’s Joe, the cranky Muslim uncle, a once promising banker who spent his forties in bed wrapped in olive oil-soaked sheets in the name of skin care. Thomson, let alone you or I, could not make this stuff up.
The author’s lame relationship with his brother Ralph gradually develops into a core theme, and you can actively feel the author nudging the book’s goalposts closer to the ‘reconciliation’ corner of the pitch.
Throughout his meditations and anecdotes, you are struck not only by how dextrous and lyrical a writer he is, but how brave he is too. Many novelists, Thomson included, will take any opportunity to stress the difficulties of their craft, but the memoir must surely be another field of landmines altogether. He risks much, you feel, especially in his precarious relationship with brother Ralph. The dysfunction of his extended family is put on show for all to see. Assumptions and prejudices are given a good airing, and key family events are interpreted publicly and from Thomson’s perspective. Isn’t this the kind of thing that drives more permanent wedges between families?
Perhaps it is, and you imagine Thomson taking a deep breath as he handed over the manuscript to publishers. But by the end of the book, his courage has paid off. His readers will be gratified and touched, his artistic temperament obeyed and exercised and his fractured family, you sense, on the road to some form of recovery.
This Party’s Got To Stop
by Rupert Thomson
Publishers: Granta
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