A review by numbersladyreads
Last Days in Cleaver Square by Patrick McGrath
5.0
‘I did it for Doc, whom I'd grievously betrayed, and about whom my guilt is a mordant canker which has gnawed at my innards for more years than I can remember, and this I only confess to you now, having deceived you as to my true condition, and pretended a soundness of mind and spirit which I frankly do not possess.'
There is no deception; we know that our dear narrator is unreliable, we do not know what is real or what is imagined, what is history or what is exaggerated - but that is part of the point I think, who of us can ever be entirely reliable?
Francis Mcnulty is coming to the end of his life, he fought in the Spanish Civil War and spent the years afterwards as a successful poet. He lives with his only daughter Gilly in his childhood home on Cleaver Square, but things are starting to move on; Gilly is engaged to be married and Francis is feeling his own mortality. He is visited regularly by a ghoul, an apparition, who Francis is convinced is General Franco who himself is close to death in Spain
Told, almost as a series of diary entries, Patrick McGrath's language is elegant and poetic yet it retains a breathtaking precision. Quoted as having the ability to expose our darkest fears without making us run away from them, he has the power to beguile his reader in a way that you are swept away and will happily follow wherever he takes you. And he takes you to the darkest of corners; the secret that has haunted for most of your life, the realisation that you cannot stop the passage of time; the inevitable end, but in a way that brings a quiet acceptance, a sense of calm. There is a humour in his writing, a smile, an encouraged chuckle and even actual laughter - his nuanced prose leaves you with a new friend, you care about Francis, he matters.
'For oh dear, it is a spartan business, this growing old, this cleaving to life, because it demands that you jettison so much that once had been the very zest and pith of life, and why? So that life, pithless, and sans zest, may continue, and the flesh, oh, the flesh, the sins of the flesh - they are as motes in a fading sunbeam. And how I do miss them. Yes.'
Dear, dear Francis McNulty will follow me and I will think of him, in the way that you do a cherished grandparent - the best of relatives; those frustrating, cantankerous humans, full of vigour and spirit. This novel tackles dark and difficult subject matter, but it left with the overriding feeling that aging is a privilege and an honour and above all something to embrace and kick the hell out of!
Thanks to #netgalley and #hutchinson for allowing me to read this ARC in return for an honest review.
There is no deception; we know that our dear narrator is unreliable, we do not know what is real or what is imagined, what is history or what is exaggerated - but that is part of the point I think, who of us can ever be entirely reliable?
Francis Mcnulty is coming to the end of his life, he fought in the Spanish Civil War and spent the years afterwards as a successful poet. He lives with his only daughter Gilly in his childhood home on Cleaver Square, but things are starting to move on; Gilly is engaged to be married and Francis is feeling his own mortality. He is visited regularly by a ghoul, an apparition, who Francis is convinced is General Franco who himself is close to death in Spain
Told, almost as a series of diary entries, Patrick McGrath's language is elegant and poetic yet it retains a breathtaking precision. Quoted as having the ability to expose our darkest fears without making us run away from them, he has the power to beguile his reader in a way that you are swept away and will happily follow wherever he takes you. And he takes you to the darkest of corners; the secret that has haunted for most of your life, the realisation that you cannot stop the passage of time; the inevitable end, but in a way that brings a quiet acceptance, a sense of calm. There is a humour in his writing, a smile, an encouraged chuckle and even actual laughter - his nuanced prose leaves you with a new friend, you care about Francis, he matters.
'For oh dear, it is a spartan business, this growing old, this cleaving to life, because it demands that you jettison so much that once had been the very zest and pith of life, and why? So that life, pithless, and sans zest, may continue, and the flesh, oh, the flesh, the sins of the flesh - they are as motes in a fading sunbeam. And how I do miss them. Yes.'
Dear, dear Francis McNulty will follow me and I will think of him, in the way that you do a cherished grandparent - the best of relatives; those frustrating, cantankerous humans, full of vigour and spirit. This novel tackles dark and difficult subject matter, but it left with the overriding feeling that aging is a privilege and an honour and above all something to embrace and kick the hell out of!
Thanks to #netgalley and #hutchinson for allowing me to read this ARC in return for an honest review.