- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape (5 April 2012)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0224091050
- ISBN-13: 978-0224091053
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 13.8 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 20,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Bageye at the Wheel
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Product Description
Book Description
A unique memoir about growing up in one of the few black families in Luton in the 1970s and a superb portrait of the author's father: the feckless, tyrannical Bageye.
Product Description
To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them gather at Mrs Knight's - Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots - each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school.
In this wonderful memoir Colin Grant looks at his father through the eyes of his ten-year-old self. Colin is Bageye's favourite 'pickney', and often his reluctant companion in his latest attempt to placate Blossom with another DIY project, or a little cash. When he acquires a less than roadworthy old car, Bageye sets himself up as an unofficial minicab service, lack of a driving licence notwithstanding. More profitable are his marijuana deals, until the day he mistakenly entrusts Colin with choosing a hiding place for a huge bag of ganja...
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a superb book, Grant's best so far and one that really establishes him as a literary writer of great skill and delicate human judgement. This memoir of growing up black in Luton in the 1970s is so enjoyable because it is both funny and fearful - fear of the father, Bageye, kept this reader on the edge of her seat throughout, as it did the five children of the house at the time - and yet Grant somehow manages to make his father both hilarious and admirable as Bageye tries to maintain standards as a man, and as a black man, who will not be second-guessed, patronised or cheated by the white man whose country he has entered. Honest to a fault at times and yet a liar, loving and terrorising his children, Bageye is unforgettable, and finally, tragic, but the book somehow always manages to respect him in his uniqueness, and to record his charm and style. The character Grant is hardest on is himself as a 12-year-old boy - he avoids the temptation of all memoir writers to make himself heroic, even though the reader discovers almost as an afterthought that the writer was once an unbeatable schoolboy boxer ( and forbidden to continue with it by his father, because he didn't want his boys to do anything the white man expected of them - ie athletics, boxing, physical prowess.) This book is, thank god, a thousand miles away from being a misery memoir: the sub-text is a story of intelligent survival on the part of the writer, but the surface records and celebrates a vanished culture, where Luton's small number of Caribbean men have their own names for each other and their own language, complex loyalties and rivalries, a cult of the car and hard-won, constant happinesses from which the women are excluded: to me the 'fellas' were a kind of Greek chorus whose entry I always looked forward to. This book has a light, dextrous voice that leaves the reader alone to laugh or grieve and a skilful shape, as a year in this boy's life somehow represents the longer, deeper tale of Caribbean migrants in Britain. The ending was one of a small number of endings to literary books that genuinely surprised me; its events turned most of my emotions about Bageye on their head, but it also left me entirely satisfied - through this book I had known a man, and his time, and the effects of what he did on those who came after him. A terrific achievement at both an artistic and a human level.
Format:Hardcover
I've been struggling to slow down with reading 'Bageye'...it's like the finest, smoothest liquor experience that I don't want to end.
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