Review - Nobody's Fool

Visiting my local recycling centre I noticed, as I sat in my car in a line of cars full of wood, metal, grass cuttings and other off-cuts and leftovers of domestic life, a full set of golf clubs, still in their golf bag, leaning against one of the skips. Someone had obviously had enough and consigned the instruments of their torture to the tip, where they had been retrieved by an eagle eyed council worker, intent on bettering either his handicap or his eBay rating.

Sully, the hero of Richard Russo’s novel ‘Nobody’s fool’, would not have approved. He would not have approved of a man playing golf, would disapprove of his giving up golf even more and, most of all, would not have approved in a man depositing his clubs in a recycling centre rather than, say, taking an angle-grinder to them. Then, Sully would probably not approve of a recycling centre, preferring a dump or tip. Sully, though capable of contradiction, is not a hypocrite and would certainly believe that when you throw something away, you get rid of it for life. Or at least you try to.

Sully does well to hold on to the role of main character in a novel full of them. The common theme running through the characters is damage, visible or not. Sully himself has a mangled knee, his lawyer has an artificial leg. Other males show some outward sign of damage or defect and the entire population of the small town they inhabit is described by an outsider as ‘funny-looking’. The females are also damaged in their way, Sully’s landlady is abnormally short and suffers a stroke during the progress of the story, Sully’s ex-wife has a full-blown breakdown.

There’s certainly a lot going on in the small town of Bath between thanksgiving and New Year. The events prove to be what Sully’s life has been building towards. A man who has tried all of his life to avoid or simply ignore any obligation or responsibility finds past responsibilities coming back to haunt him in the form of his son and his grandson, who closely resembles his son at that age, an age when Sully had little contact with him. His landlady is fond of reminding Sully that ‘we wear the chains we forge in life’, apt at Christmas time and for a man being visited by the spirits of his past.

The small town of Bath is beautifully drawn here, reading ‘Nobody’s Fool’ allowed me to visit The Horse and made me crave a big ol’ cheeseburger and long necked beer to wash it down, or visit the diner for breakfast. Such places only exist in our memories, tinted by nostalgia, or in the pages of books now.

While the town and the people inhabiting it are warm, the winter is cold and that too is beautifully described, not as a winter wonderland (indeed Sully is praying for snow so that he can use the plough attachment for his truck and make some money) but in the hard unforgiving nature of true winter, that breaks the branches on the elms that line the street he lives on and causes his landlady so much concern, or hardens the ground so that Sully can’t do the hard graft that supports him.

One of the most attractive things about the story is that Sully is entirely uncompromising throughout. Acutely aware of his many failings – he knows for instance when he is on a ‘stupid streak’ – he persists with his actions which, though ill considered, are usually the right ones, even if they do include punching a policeman.

Small towns in novels have their share of eccentrics and Sully is not one of these, he’s not rich enough, so he’s merely a pain in the ass. It’s the normal folk in the novel that are shown as causing the real, long term pain to those around them. Sully, forgetful and irresponsible is, towards the revealing final act of the novel, the one who is responsible for the well-being of all those around him. This is a carefully handled transition and purposely not a redemption – Sully never needed to be redeemed in the first place.

Review - The Riddle of the Sands

First, a word on the edition. Pengin, 1950s green and white cover and a design classic. Why Penguin ever decided to stop doing their book covers like this is a mystery worthy of a green and white (‘mystery and crime’) cover itself. Recently, Penguin have returned to this format but, for the longest time, their covers were adorned by details from forgettable paintings, usually dour virgins in bonnets looking constipated. This edition I picked up second hand for a couple of quid and, to be frank, it is falling apart but it has obviously served time riding in the jacket pocket of chaps and blokes who have, at various times, waited in train stations, outside the headmaster’s office, outside the maternity ward and sat on beaches and in pubs, in foreign bars and lonely hotel rooms. If I were in a tight spot, this is the book I would choose to have with me.

It’s a story about chaps. And boats. And rotters. And mud, lots of mud. By Christ there’s a lot of mud. Riddle of the mud would be closer to the truth, but finishing it I wanted to jump in a small boat and lose myself in a big sea.

Originally published over 100 years ago, it’s a story that has certain aspects absolutely fixed in the Victorian age, and others that are as fresh as rockpool whelk. The opening is a splendid description of a chap left behind in London when all of his friends have gone on holiday, it’s sort of a ’28 days later’ for the upper classes; London is inhabited only by chaps like our hero, held behind on business, and the servants who cater for their every whim. Hellish. During August, one understands, one is expected to be busy depopulating grouse moors rather than attending to the business of Government.

All this changes with the arrival of a telegram summoning our chap abroad. I won’t rehash the plot but it involves sailing, the discovery of a fiendish plot, and the thwarting of same. There’s even a love interest.

The love interest I really, really enjoyed. While today it is quite the done thing to post compromising images of one’s lady friends on the internet, back then chaps did not talk about their feelings, even with their wives. Such ‘artistic’ behaviour was the preserve of beastly types and foreigners. The chaps in the novel smoke cigars but, I swear to God, every time one or the other mentions the object of affection, the effect of the prose is to convey that the other bites down on his pipe stem hard enough to bite off a chunk. And he’s not even smoking a pipe!

Other aspects of the novel are bang up to date. Truth is, man’s elemental struggle with the sea hasn’t changed much over the millennia. At the end of the day, all the gizmo’s in the world will not help you when the seas are mountainous, the wind and unforgiving shriek and dry land is a long, long way off. While the talented sailor of our two chaps never really admits to it, one senses that during the passage where he is in a bit of tight spot, his reaction would probably not be to blub into his diary cam; no, instead he swears revenge on the rotter who nearly led him to his doom.

The great thing about the book is that you ostensibly have a couple of talented amateurs who crack a vile plot. However, throughout the novel I could not help but think that there was more to them than was revealed. Would you really just telegram a chum you had not seen in years to come on a sailing holiday with you? The sailing chap of the novel seems very, very well equipped, intellectually and morally. One cannot but feel that he is secret service, exploiting his foreign office chum.

Such suspicions are left unanswered. What is apparent is that this is a novel that strongly conveys a sense of place; from the almost Woosterish atmosphere of the opening pages to the bleak mud (sorry, sand) flats of the German coast. All this and skulduggery too!