The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman
April 28th, 2003by Bruce Robinson
ISBN: 0060955406
I didn’t find the stories of Thomas Penman’s memories as interesting as I thought I would.
The story is about Thomas Penman and his awkward journey across that line dividing the men from the boys. This involves learning how to smoke and drink, finding pornography, giving up gross habits for love, and a ravingly dysfunctional family imploding as the eldest member dies and the middle generation’s affairs are found out.
It isn’t that this is a bad book (though an author could do better than to make shit a central metaphor, and then explain how this is a central metaphor) it just isn’t a particularly good one. I thought at first this would be like watching an English movie — maybe it would take the first ten or twenty minutes to get used to the accent — but then I would be settled in and absorbed in the story. Nope, didn’t happen.
The parts where Thomas connects with his grandfather have real emotion in them, and there are a few funny bits which are almost enough to make me wish there was more to the book so I could recommend it. But unless you really have a passion for coming of age stories set in England in the 1950s, you can safely pass this one up.
