Customer Reviews

The Children of Dynmouth (Penguin Decades)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This darkly funny expose of a British seaside town in the mid 70's is Trevor at his absolute best. Tim Gedge, the maladjusted anti-hero at the centre of the action, is a 12 year old boy with time on his hands and a determination to uncover the secret heartaches and hypocricies at the core of this trim English town. The details are razor sharp, the characters painfully portrayed, and the humour is very, very black - but there is a soul to this story - as there always is with Trevor. It tells you more about us sorry Brits than Notes from a Small Island ever could.

William Trevor continues to lead the pack as my favourite living author throughout the world. His frugal use of the most precise language leaves a reader gasping at times, and he is an unparallelled master tragedian. Here, he has actually crafted a fairly humourous, if naughty, tale of a teenage "tearaway," as he himself might call the lad. Trevor imbues this lonesome council lad with some rather astonishing powers of perception that, once put to work with the singlemindedness reserved solely for what one really really wants, results in a domino effect of despair and destruction that washes over a small, raw, seaside Southern UK town. It remains funny throughout, however, a testament not only to Trevor's many gifts as a story-teller of genius and power but to his love for his flawed characters and thier powers of endurance.

This book reminded me of A Girl in the Head by J.G Farrell, another Anglo-Irish writer, and to a lesser extent Jonathan Raben's Foreign Land, both of which unveil the sordid underbelly of life in a small coastal town in southern England.

The main character is a creepy 15-year-old boy who seems to know everyone's secrets - or invents such convincing ones that they become almost real - and sets out to blackmail the adults and children alike in order to get what he wants.

What he wants are only some simple props for an act he intends making at a talent contest, such as a tin bath, a man's suit and a wedding dress. He eventually gets them but at an emotional cost that his victims will never be able to pay.

Someone like Farrell would probably have turned the book into a black comedy but Trevor takes more of a Lord of the Flies approach to children and what they can get up to if left on their own.

It is a good read with a strong narrative and Trevor has created some memorable characters like the boy, Timothy Gedge, the "Commander" who gets him drunk and the clergyman's wife who has to cope with her private grief while ministering to the derelicts who turn up at the vicarage door demanding help.

However, he does not convincingly portray the relationship between Gedge and the 12-year-old boy and girl he harries. Nor does he do a good job of explaining the relationship between the boy and girl, whose parents have just married.

Furthermore, the idea that the Commander has been a secret homosexual all his life and his marriage of 36 years has not been consummated is a little difficult to accept.

Clever but strange and sour tale of a deprived boy living in a crummy old seaside town, whose daydreams focus on his glorious appearances as a comedian on 'Opportunity Knocks'. He divides his time between watching the box in his absent mum's council flat, and badgering the townspeople, telling them about the darkly comic act which he hopes will win him the annual fete's talent competition, and finally blackmailing them into supplying him with the necessary sets and costumes! Don't be misled by the quaint little painting on the cover of the old British edition - this is an awful story, all about neglect, failure and delusion, though the curiously flat and unsubtle prose make it not quite as devastating as it really should have been.

Well, maybe I'm not qualified to review this because I didn't finish it, but I tried twice, 6 months apart and both times I only made it about 40 pages and just couldn't continue. Maybe some people like this type of writing style, to me it lacked connection to real emotion or interest, and seemed like merely a ponderous exercise in the author's use of various writing techniques. Because it is a Penguin edition, and because I thought all Irish writers were great, I passed it on to my wife without any comment, thinking maybe she could appreciate something in it that I missed, but she had the same reaction.