Amazon.com Review
A quiet, unassuming postman develops an unexpected obsession in this quiet, unassuming--and very English--first novel from Michael Palin of Monty Python fame. Martin Sproale is the very model of a modern Walter Mitty. An assistant postmaster in the coastal town of Threston, he lives at home with his mother and rides his bicycle to work each day. It's a pleasant but uneventful sort of life, marked only by Martin's growing fascination with the life, works, and personal style of Ernest Hemingway. "Tea-drinkers, mothers, post office administrators, would-be fiancées. Little people with little minds," Martin thinks. "When would they realise that only through confrontation with danger could life be lived to the full?" Martin has transformed his room into a kind of Hemingway shrine, complete with bullfighting poster, several first editions, the same kind of typewriter Papa used--even a vintage WWI Italian army first-aid cabinet filled with all the liquors he liked to drink.
Two things happen to shatter Martin's equilibrium. First, a new, corporate-style postal manager takes the job that by rights should have been his, promptly beginning a campaign of privatization and modernization that threatens all Martin holds dear. Second, an American woman outbids him on Hemingway memorabilia; a scholar, "not a fan," of the writer, Ruth Kohler lives in seclusion nearby while she works on a book about the women in Hemingway's life. Martin and Ruth engage in some increasingly heated role-playing as the conflict over Threston's post office comes to a slow boil. Deprived of his position, his cozy world crashing down around him, Martin finds himself acting more like the he-man writer than he ever thought possible. Palin's debut is in some ways a surprise: poignant rather than funny, skillfully paced and couched in workmanlike but hardly spectacular prose. Readers expecting Pythonesque absurdity might find themselves disappointed--but only at first; with patience, this book unfolds its more subtle pleasures with understated aplomb.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
With apologies to the late Tip O'Neill, it could be said that all humor is local. Palin is best known for his work as a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, the comedy troupe that poked fun at quaint English customs with a subtle humor Americans enjoyed but probably did not fully understand. Palin serves up much of the same in this light but entertaining first novel about Martin Sproale, a postal worker in a small seaside town trying to save his beloved post office from the ravaging forces of modernization, technology, Thatcherite greed, and the European Union. Sproale strives to emulate his hero, Ernest Hemingway, trying to transform himself into the contumacious American writer to battle the novel's corporate villains. An American Hemingway scholar writing in England feeds his obsession and encourages him in his struggle, culminating in a very Pythonesque denouement.
Hemingway is well crafted and witty, but the personalities and peculiarities in this humorous portrait of small-town English life lose some of their context on this side of the Atlantic.
Ted Leventhal
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
