The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman [Hardcover]

Bruce Robinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1999

Meet thirteen-year-old Thomas Penman. Growing up in a bizarre household of eccentrics, including a mother and father who wage a silent war against each other. Thomas downs his first drink, smokes his first cigarette, pursues the beautiful Gwendolin Hackett--all the while forming a special bond with his beloved, ailing Grandpa Walker, a World War II veteran prone to dark habits. An obsessive snooper, Thomas undertakes a quest to locate his grandfather's legendary pornography collection, setting in motion a series of misadventures that ultimately leads him to uncover secrets about his life that will change him irrevocably. The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman is a hilarious, engaging, and touching debut novel, a brilliant tale of one British working-class teen's unforgettable coming of age.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman is the author's fascination with every form of bodily excretion. Feces, sputum, semen, earwax--the list is endless. We discover early on that Thomas "from the age of four ... navigated all lavatories and shat himself everywhere else," and the pages that follow detail the boy's obsession with his own fecal matter in terms that are as imaginative as they are repugnant. Having established from the get-go that young Thomas Penman is not going to be an ordinary hero, Bruce Robinson (who wrote the screenplays for the films The Killing Fields and Withnail & I, and also directed the latter) then launches us into his protagonist's life with a vengeance. In short order we discover that Thomas's grandfather, Walter, is riddled with cancer and as obsessed with naked women as his 14-year-old grandson. In addition, Thomas's father, Rob, is involved in an illicit affair and his mother has hired a private detective to prove it. And Thomas himself is madly, truly, deeply in love with the divine Gwen Hackett.

Pornography, masturbation, voyeurism--according to Robinson, these are the main preoccupations of the adolescent boy. This book is being compared to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and who's to say that Holden Caulfield might not have had similar hobbies had he been written 40 years later? If you can get past the raunchiness of the language and the situations, Thomas makes an unexpectedly sympathetic hero, and his relationship with his half-mad grandfather is oddly tender. The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman is not for the faint of stomach, but for those who like their fiction raw, this one fits the bill. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

A dysfunctional family in an English coastal town of the late 1950s achieves chaotic free-fall in this mordantly comic, rowdy first novel (published last year in England) about an unloved, neglected boy's furious search for identity. English screenwriter Robinson (The Killing Fields; Withnail & I) has created an ambivalent antihero in asthmatic, big-eared, cynical Thomas Penman, age 14 in 1959, a sensitive imp who writes poems to his girlfriend Gwendolin Hackett and savors Dickens and antiques. Caught in a tug of war between parents who loathe each other and sleep at opposite ends of their dilapidated Victorian house, Thomas manifests a hurt, darker side: he tortures crabs, blasting them to hell on homemade rockets, and, under the impression that beloved, comatose Grandpa Walter is dead, riffles through the codger's pornography collection. The narrative, overspiced with four-letter words, swings from broad farce to domestic tragedy, from bathroom humor to self-discovery, with fairly predictable, peculiarly English results. Robinson hews to an idiosyncratic vision, as Thomas stubbornly unearths family secrets?learning that Walter is dying of cancer, and discovering the true identity of his own biological father. The author manages to fuse lyricism, teen angst and raunchy satire of adult hypocrisy into a funny, tender, fiercely beautiful exploration of the humiliations, traumas, sexual awkwardness, first loves and false steps of adolescence. Agent, Ed Victor.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 278 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879519142
• ISBN-13: 978-0879519148
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,125,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A raucous yet tender romp, February 9, 2000

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (Hardcover)

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman may be peculiar to those who have forgotten that bizarre landscape of wide-eyed, hormone-driven adolesence through which we all passed, but to this reader the rites of passage facing the 14 year old have rarely been so candidly captured. Thomas Penman has strange behaviors, but as his creator Robinson relates them, they all serve as seeds to explain with great wit and empathy the results of Thomas' coming of age. This is a wonderful little book that reads rapidly (as in difficult to put it down), entertains us with outrageous situations, then ties a series of clues to the Everyman question of Who Am I and How Did I Get Here? into a deeply touching finale. These characters are unforgetable - everyone of them from the main character, his best friend Maurice, the Vicar Potts, the psychic Olanda, the radiantly drawn Gwendolin, and of course Walter his Grandfather. A wonderful excursion and addition to the READ THIS List for teenagers. Suggestion: Don't let the language in the first chapter throw you off course: it is there for a reason!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thomas Penman is a great kid, just glad he's not mine, April 11, 2000

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Veronica Bennett (Wilmington, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (Paperback)

I was wandering through Blackwell's Books in Oxford the summer of 1998. These pie-shaped eyes were glaring at me as I walked past the stacks of new arrivals. One look at "Thomas" and I had to read it. While I was in Oxford studying WWII, I found myself rushing through school work so I could immerse my last waking hours reading of Thomas' adventures. Usually my loud guffaws were met by enquiring roommates at the door dying to know why I was dying of hysteria. When I arrived home from England, I promptly suggested that several of my male friends read this. They found Thomas to be a very cool kid. Its crude and rude, but it is also sweet and tender. Enjoy...

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wrap Yourself Around this Book, November 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (Hardcover)

Bruce Robinson's mastery of descriptive language was so delicious I found myself reading whole paragraphs aloud, to no one in particular, just to hear the words. Selections should be publicly read on Mr. Robinson's birthday by the best British voices available.

While reading this book, I would occasionally look up and wonder what on earth I was doing in the subway, in a restaurant or wherever I was, so completely enveloping was the mood evoked in the story as it unfolded. Eventually, I was sorry the book ended, mostly because Mr. Robinson hasn't another novel out to immediately dive into. To those of you who feel the same, I recommend a reading of the script of "Withnail and I", which is online.