Tuesday, February 24, 2009

the last book I read

Walter by David Cook.

I picked this up for the princely sum of 80p a few years ago in the splendid Amnesty International bookshop on the Gloucester Road in Bristol, here.

Sarah is a young Lancastrian woman who marries a gawky young man called Eric in the 1920s. Needless to say, this being England in the first half of the 20th century, both of them are horribly ignorant about sex - Sarah's mother having waged a campaign of terror about Sarah's congenitally narrow hips, and sweaty predatory men with big fat coarse cheesy fingers just itching to do unspeakably penetrative things to her, and Eric being a timid unassertive type terrified by the whole business.

Lurking at the back of Eric's mind is a vague recollection of the orphanage where he grew up, and some dire warnings from his early guardians about what would happen should he ever have children. Basically it turns out there were some unsavoury goings-on with Eric's father and his sister (who was also, we are invited to assume, his mother), and, in a way very similar to what happens in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, the sins of the father are visited upon the next-but-one generation. But while Cal, the hero/heroine of Middlesex, is a bright child with an awkward physical affliction to deal with, Walter, Sarah and Eric's son, is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fucking cretin.

Walter eventually learns to get to the toilet on his own and inherits some of his father's enthusiasm for racing pigeons, and even manages to hold down a job collecting cardboard in Woolworth's. Eric's early death puts a bit of a wrinkle in Walter and Sarah's routine, but things continue pretty much as normal until one day Sarah not only fails to come and wake Walter up for work as usual, but, as Walter discovers when he eventually plucks up courage to go into her room, won't wake up herself. At all.

Needless to say the authorities eventually take charge of the situation and, in addition to carting off Sarah's mouldering corpse for disposal, cart Walter off to a mental institution. Where, basically, he stays until we leave him at the end of the book. There's just a suggestion that he may have found a suitable niche in life looking after those even more mentally deficient than himself, but that's about the only ray of hope on the horizon.

It's as profoundly grim as it sounds, for all that there's a bit of black humour from time to time. Clearly the protagonist is not going to have any sudden epiphany whereby he stops being a fucking cretin, so his scope for character development is quite limited. That being the case I struggled to see what the point of the whole exercise was. I don't want to get all "what was the author trying to say here", but, at the same time, what was the author trying to say here?

Two brief footnotes: firstly, Walter was made into a TV drama, shown on Channel 4's opening night in 1982 and starring Ian McKellen. Also, it won the venerable Hawthornden literary prize when it was first published in 1978. In the usual way I have to log which ones I've read, and the list goes like this: 1935, 1941, 1975, 1978, 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2005.

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