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Rating: Irvine Welsh, Nick Hornby, and Doddy Doyle represent Scotland, England, and Ireland: different, yes, but also similar.
-They have always been my triad of contemporary British authors.
-They all became famous in the nineties.
Trainspotting, Fever Pitch, and Paddy Clark ah ah ah! are the novels that brought them to the limelight and are all published by Guanda. Trainspotting, High Fidelity, and The Commitments are the books through which I got to know them.
- Two of them, if they have to talk about a working-class suburb, call it Korea.
And it's something very eighties, when we still looked at that corner of the world from the height of our opulence, so that it had become synonymous with decline.
I also remember that someone (maybe even myself) was often called "Biafra" when they were excessively thin. Not to mention the various regional banter (let's call it that, shall we?)... You cannot be proud of it, but that's how it was and forgetting it is useless.
Returning to the three: in the nineties, they tried to refresh and strip that veneer of courtesy from the British narrative tradition, telling it through the most popular fetishes: drugs, football, and music.
The spoken word entered the written page and devoured it with the slang and dialect expressions of Irish, Scottish, or English suburbs. Our authors had “gone down to the street” and returned to us a cocktail of linguistically explosive oral expressions, providing authenticity to the slice of society represented: seasoned with despair, cynicism, and dark humor in Welsh, and a poetics of small things in Hornby and Doyle.
The premises were important. However, afterward, not all were fulfilled.
«It is certainly a phenomenon of every stage of life. At some point, you “have it” and then you lose it. And it’s gone forever. At every stage of life. Georgie Best, for example. He had it and then he lost it. Or David Bowie or Lou Reed. And then Charlie Nicholas, David Niven, Malcolm MacLaren, Elvis Presley»
As if by a fatal law of retribution, the life theory of Sick Boy seems to have come true for his first father and his fellow adventurers: in the new millennium, it seems that the spark no longer ignites as it once did for any of the three.
In one of his novels, Irvine Welsh finds renewed inspiration by meeting Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie again and writing his Porno, or Trainspotting, twenty years later.
Hornby, in the absence of inspiration, follows our passion and gets paid for it (see Shakespeare Wrote for Money and subsequent publications), finally Doddy Doyle writes A Year of Good Living.
What's it about?
It’s about a year, told in episodes. No big unified story, but episodes, anecdotes, and adventures of daily life. Each has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It resembles a sitcom.
There is the narrator, Charlie Savage, a sixty-year-old grandfather, retired, lover of football and beer, his wife, children, and grandchildren. The book is a chronicle of his most significant days and an account of his life. Charlie encounters contemporary reality (Charlie and the TV series, “My wife and I have gone crazy for box sets”; Charlie, the influencer; Charlie and fluid sexuality; Charlie, his children and grandchildren) and what remains of his adolescence (Charlie and rock music; Charlie and football, “I love football”, hence “I hate summer”; Charlie and the pub; Charlie and his wife, his old flame, and his old friends).
Then there are Charlie’s reflections.
“I eliminated the word normal from my vocabulary several years ago and put it above the fridge… I know: there’s nothing normal and I'm fine with that… Mom, dad, four, five, six or seven kids, and a dog. When I was little, this was normal… Now, Martin, my best friend, has a female identity and a passionate late-life relationship with the girl I kissed at sixteen, and she seems attracted to him precisely because he would prefer to be a woman, but he is a man. Now this is my normality.”
“A book on beer! As far as I’m concerned, it’s as useful as a book on inspiration and respiration, Breathing for Dummies. But I say nothing. I just enjoy being together. He asked me to accompany him, so I am beside myself with joy and boredom, simultaneously.”
In short, for Charlie, it was like that, normality told him it should have been like that, but it’s different, and he’s okay with it.
Charlie is weak thought.
His thinking is polyvalent: each of the existing viewpoints (the viewpoints of individuals as well as those of different civilizations) is legitimized internally, as an existing voice, an acceptable viewpoint.
Charlie is not Clint Eastwood.
Charlie is me, I who feel clearly and sharply, individually and discriminatively, but who, with thought, also embrace the opposite feeling.
This is why A Year of Good Living made me feel good for a few hours, but it didn’t turn me inside out like a sock, didn’t hammer on my skull for entire nights, didn’t change me.
Therefore, A Year of Good Living is a good book, not a great book.
Rating: 3.5/5
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