Twenty One Gun Salute

The Sunday Times - Books



September 04, 2005

Fiction: Stories We Could Tell by Tony Parsons
REVIEWED BY TOM DEVESON



STORIES WE COULD TELL
by Tony Parsons
HarperCollins £17.99 pp320


The novels of Tony Parsons are at least consistent, and his latest is as
dire as you might expect. A short story bloated to book length with trivia,
it's set in the summer of 1977 when London music clubs were "the centre of
the universe". This vacuous portentousness is pervasive. The punk singer Joe
Strummer is "beautiful and doomed". Elvis Presley dies and the word
"apocalyptic" is applied without irony. "Everything was changing" - this
means haircuts, trousers "and all stops in between". Parsons realises that
such self-enclosed piety is seemly only in the young and foolish, but he
doesn't know what to do about it. Embarrassing allusions to Hardy, Puccini,
Mailer and Larkin only make matters worse. References to council tax (not
introduced until 1993) add to the chronological confusion.
There are three central characters, united in journalistic devotion to a
thinly disguised New Musical Express. Although one is a hippyish throwback,
one a would-be revolutionary street fighter and one merely bewildered, none
is more than a fictional cipher. Their girlfriends are even dimmer. The
author indulgently suggests that their teenage view of life will eventually
be replaced by a more mature sense of complexity, but doesn't convince us
that he understands what that might mean. When one of them fails to persuade
a married woman to come and live with him, "his heart felt like it had been
kicked down the street".
As this shows, Parsons flaunts his clichés with unabashed pride. One formula
does overtime. We hear of "the most wonderful taste in the world", "the
fastest music in the world", "the most beautiful girl in the world", "the
worst drink in the world", "the best smell in the world" and "the greatest
music writer in the world" who is also "the shyest man in the world".
This is not the worst novel in the world but its contemptible
sentimentality, its fatuous pretension, its numbing incoherence and its smug
banality make it a plausible candidate.




c/o ROBBIE

"This is not the worst novel in the world but its contemptible
sentimentality, its fatuous pretension, its numbing incoherence and its
smug banality make it a plausible candidate."

Jesus.

Can this be the same old Tom D who left our pub due to some of us
exceding his sense of propriety and good breeding?

The above also sounds like some of our former compatriots, no?

"contemptible sentimentality" and "fatuous pretension" .... hmmm? Not
to mention "smug banality"?

As to "numbing incoherence" I suppose all of us are numb at this point
and incoherence is everywhere, regardless of how hard we try.

I find it curious why it is all right to say these kind of things in
the Times, where the ability of the author to respond is limited at
best, while in a minor newsgroup like ABGO such talk is not to be
tolerated.

Could it be that Mr. Deveson inadvertantly describes himself?