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MY LIFE AS A MAN
by Frederic Lindsay
St Martin's Minotaur, April 2009
244 pages
$24.99
ISBN: 0312376391


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Harry Glass is not quite nineteen and living in a house with the man his mother left behind when she went off with someone else. He hasn't seen his actual father in years. The very morning that he is just starting his first job in a factory, his "stepfather" boots him out to make room for a new girlfriend. Nor is that the end of his troubles. Before the week is out, he'll be sacked from his job and embarked on a cross-Scotland flight in his boss's car with his boss's strangely stunned and passive wife.

The wife, Eileen, perhaps twenty years older than Harry, has been sitting in that car outside the factory all day, every day, of the week that Harry works there. She's intrigued the lad, and when he is unfairly let go, he impulsively snatches up the car keys from his boss's desk and jumps in the car beside her and drives off. Curiously, she makes no move to stop him.

What began as a thoughtless act of defiance quickly turns into a flight for their lives. The boss may want his wife back, but someone else wants the briefcase locked in the trunk of the car badly enough to kill for it. As the pair seek safety, Harry, who is essentially a thoroughly sweet young man, discovers in himself unexpected resources that get them out of trouble.

Eventually, they wind up at a remote farm where they are offered refuge by a rather strange pair who claim to be from South Africa and husband and wife. Whether either claim is true and whether Harry and Eileen are truly safe there remains open to question.

The time is the late 1950s, bracketed by a prologue and epilogue set in 2003. This time frame is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it makes Harry's essential innocence and Eileen's passivity more credible than they might be were this set in the present moment. But more to the point, there is a larger context at work here. The older characters were all scarred to one degree or another by the Second World War and the world that all have inherited is one that is marked by the "dirty secret of the dull Fifties and all the decades that followed." The secret? "Europe of the high culture was a continent of torturers."

The jacket copy places the book in the school of Patricia Highsmith, and like most of these comparisons, there isn't a lot of truth in it. But there is some. Lindsay develops an edgy nervousness, a sense of dread that reminds one of Highsmith and her characters who are bizarrely but compellingly unreadable in their motivation. Still Lindsay does what Highsmith doesn't - he salvages something from the wreck that is worth preserving.

Frederic Lindsay is in his mid-seventies and has been writing professionally for thirty years. Yet I, at least, and I suspect most North Americans, have never heard of him. I certainly plan to seek out his other books as soon as I can and repair my deficiency and you might well do the same, starting with this relatively recent example.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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