Once Upon a Time in England [Paperback]

 

 

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Once Upon a Time in England - where to start? The initial ingredients are: the 1970s, the north of England, and a mixed marriage. You know something bad is going to happen.

Robbie is a carrot headed man of Irish heritage, living in Warrington. He sings with showbands and goes down a storm. Susheela is a Malay Indian from Kuala Lumpur who came to England to train as a nurse and find a husband. She found Robbie. Helen Walsh visits the family at three significant times - 1975, 1981 and 1989. In the first installment, Robbie and Susheela are in love; they have a young son Vincent and Susheela is expecting a second. But there are already tensions. The couple already seem to be divided on the question of exotic spice - whether in food (Susheela would like some, Robbie wouldn't) or in life in general. Robbie finds himself ostracized for his mixed marriage and he seems to find escape in his singing. Meanwhile, Susheela is threatened, and before long is raped in her own home by a gang of skinheads as part of a racial assault. Susheela tries to play it down - she decides to tell neither the police nor Robbie what really happened, but in truth she has lost her confidence for ever. By way of escape, she aims to integrate herself into white suburbia, surrounding herself with symbols of bland safety. And from this unpromising start, the family's lives start to unravel over the course of the next fourteen years.

The success of the novel is the enormity of what it takes on. It addresses a whole heap of social issues - race, mixed marriage, rape, homosexuality, queer bashing, drugs, social class, adultery, ambition, and the list goes on. Yet the skill is that it never feels as though it is ticking issues off on a list. Susheela is not a token Asian; Vincent is not a token gay; Ellen is not a token teenage rebel. Nobody is there to play a part, rather the story unravels around people who are, simply, themselves. That results in a work that is very engaging, very credible and very intense. The depth of the problems and issues makes for a very rich experience.

It's also striking that Helen Walsh avoided the trap of creating one-dimensional victims. To a great extent, the characters do not help themselves. There is the feeling that, for example, Vincent is not bullied because he is black, but because he is weak. There is wrong choice after wrong choice. Moving to Thelwall; not reporting the rape; choosing the wrong school bag; buying the wrong car; going to the wrong school; ... It is a catalogue of distasters, some of which might even be funny if they were not so tragic. This is lightened by the occasional glimmer of hope - Ellie's scholarship to the private school; Vincent's writing prize; Robbie's affair; Susheela's friendship with (horrors) Robbie's boss's wife. But each hope proves to be a false dawn.

The ending, when it comes, is both noble and squalid. It shocks to the core.

The novel is not without fault. There are a couple of glaring anachronisms. And more worryingly, the first thirty or forty pages felt like wading through a thick fog of alliteration and flowery language that obscured all meaning. Perhaps this died back after the opening chapters or perhaps the rape had an immediacy that broke through the over-writing. But once the first tension has been built, and seen through to a horrific denouement, there is nothing more to distract - just pure, raw, deep emotion.

Once Upon a Time in England is a valuable testament to the times and places it describes. 1970s and 1980s England was a hard place to grow up. Young people had to make conscious decisions about whether to take a path of racism and bigotry, or whether to take a more liberal view. Many felt enormous social pressure to swing to the right. This is an unsentimental depiction of the effect that such decisions, such pressure had on fellow man.

Once Upon a Time in England is an excellent antidote to 70s and 80s nostalgia. They were not glory days, they were hard times.

I am a voracious reader yet this type of book (contemporary urban fiction I suppose) is not the sort of thing I would normally read. I usually read sci-fi , fantasy , horror thrillers or non- fiction yet for some reason I wanted to read this book and whatever sixth sense made me want to do that was especially well attuned that day For Once Upon A Time In England is a stunning memorable book.
I assume it's fair to call Once Upon A Time In England a modern kitchen sink drama though it is also fair to say it covers more universal theme's like how bigotry and racial intolerance tear families and communities apart and breed more intolerance. The story starts in the 1970,s where flame haired Robbie Fitzgerald is married to his Malaysian born wife Susheela .They have a baby son Vincent and a daughter Millie and live on a working class estate in Warrington where people ordering Chinese take aways are viewed with suspicion so this family are ideal targets for the local extremists. The story moves into the 1980,s and the family have moved into a more affluent part of town yet they are still treated with wariness and more subtle and sly forms of racism as high unemployment and the menacing rise of the BNP cast a vindictive shadow over the family.
What makes this book so terrific is that Helen Walsh has not only got a pragmatic handle on these characters but also of the times they set in . The music , fashion socio-politics (It helps that Helen Walsh has led a fairly colourful life herself) are all spot on and there are helpful doses of earthy humour. The ending is tragic and moving yet importantly retains an edge of hope as Vincent claws his life back for himself. It's very rare for a book to leave me with a lump in my throat but this book did.

I quite enjoyed Helen Walsh's first book `Brass', despite its flaws, and therefore approached her second book with high hopes.

What I've just read though, is a book that must have been written before Brass, as it is so mawkish and at times outright immature, surely it can only be a predecessor to that first publication. This beggars the question: what was she doing in the four intervening years between the books? Has she really said all she can say with Brass?

The story centres around fourteen years [1975-89] in the life of the Fitzgerald family, made up of Robbie, a factory working aspiring pub/club singer, Susheela [or `Sheila'] his wife, a pretty Malaysian girl dumped out of time and place in 70s Warrington and their two children Vincent and Ellie [who is born at the beginning of the book].

These characters are not so much remarkable for the way they are drawn as two dimensional losers [everything that goes wrong, does go wrong for each of them], but by the absolute unlikeability they each exude. I know it's `grim up north' and hard done by characters are not difficult to find in real life and give great mileage in a novel, but each Fitzgerald family member has relentlessly, nothing for you to latch on to and even get close to liking or sympathising with. It eventually gets to the point where you just want to grab each one by the shoulders and shout `get real and GROW UP!!!' into their sad, `oh woe is me' or `I'm going to get off my face and everything will be better' little faces.

It must be said though that the opening drama is very effective and affecting, as the pregnant Susheela is raped by skinheads, an event she doesn't tell her husband about. He at the same time misses his chance of the Big Time in showbiz, but the dynamism inherent in the family trauma that inevitably follows this double whammy, seems to somehow fizzle out.

It's clear, even more so than in Brass, there is a strong semi-autobiographical nature to this book, and the young girl Ellie must be modelled on the author herself. In fact the underlying, clearly autobiographical driver is the same as in Brass: the need for the young girl character to achieve some sort of physical and emotional reunion with an estranged parent. In Brass it is Millie and her mother stuck in Scotland, in OUATIE its Ellie and her father stuck in Blackpool. This is no bad thing but it is so simplistically single-minded in the way it is pursued in terms of Helen Walsh's teenage-angst meets rose-tinted-view-of parental-motives prose style, as to be rendered at best misguided, at worst meaningless and ultimately, embarrassingly juvenile.

The book however does pick up in its last third and this is no coincidence, as this is the more contemporary period and we hear Ellie's young teenage voice, which is the territory Helen Walsh commands so well. The description of Manchester's nightlife and seedier side are spot on, even if one scene where Vincent meets his trendy mates in a bar, and is supposed to be impressing them with his cool intellect is painfully awful.

Funnily enough though as in Brass, it is secondary characters that are the more interesting/complex and make the most impact, such as Kenny, a lad who Vinnie [who has become a tortured 18 year old writer and `aesthete'] falls in love with, only in one of many acts of abject loser-ness, he misreads/misses the overtly gay signals from the boy and almost blows any chance of a relationship with him. This is a clever observation/plot twist device and there are a couple of others, but they get swamped by the dross of sub-Mills and Boonsian prose that dominates the book and which is just too humourless, contrived and repetitious. [for example halfway through I thought, if I read the word `eye line' again I'll scream- as in `their eye lines met `or `I searched and found his eye line' but of course it just kept coming and coming and coming...]

Unfortunately the awfully written bar scene is a portent of where the book is heading, because the finale soon looms. It pains me to say this, but the last few pages of this book are the most trite, syrupy, oversentimental and embarrassingly awful rubbish I think I've ever read in adult, contemporary fiction. If you buy this book and make it to the end, I don't want to spoil it too much [although the plot climax can actually be spotted a mile off], I'll just say though a boy called Vincent...a Dad who is a cabaret singer/Elvis impersonator...a funeral eulogy...and a Don McLean song called Vincent...yes that's right. It's that bad. Oh dear.

I must admit I feel a bit churlish for only given two stars to a book I picked up to read every night without much of a second thought, but it is the fact that the book achieved that with me that gives it two, rather than one star, which it probably really deserves for the cringe-worthy finale alone.

Also I wouldn't have been so hard on this book if I hadn't of expected so much more from its writer, who I thought had so much more to offer, and of course the hype that has surrounded Helen Walsh as `the voice of a generation.' In that way I am perplexed by the plethora of 4/5 star reviews here, but hey, it may well press buttons for a lot of people that I don't have, so fair play there.

Whatever, I still maintain that at the end of the day this is a thoroughly disappointing and sloppily written novel to the point almost it seems, of either active authorly disinterest or just rampant, self-indulgent juvenile immaturity, or perhaps a combination of the two. In fact the ending is so appalling, I think even a writer of teenage novels would have thought twice about going there.

Finally more than anything, sadly, I think it shows that the publisher Canongate's quality control is perhaps not all it should be. It's a shame...at this juncture one is tempted to say 'she will write better books than this,' but I honestly aren't sure of that after these two books. I hope she does, but only time will tell in this fairy tale world of contemporary England, where the ability to self-promote seems to eclipse substance more than ever before.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it
The realistic, multi-dimensional characters make you feel almost a part of their family and you care about them all. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Not Much More

4.0 out of 5 stars Great
I approached this book with trepidation and then loved it. Mainy set in the 1980s in an England which I recognised. Read more

Published 16 months ago by Louiseog

5.0 out of 5 stars Gritty, real and sad reflection of our society
Reading this book made me feel sad for the society that I live in. It is about racism and its associated cruelty at all levels from the unintentional/ignorant actions of... Read more

Published 18 months ago by Janie U

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutally Beautiful
This book is both vividly raw and yet deeply touching. It is a book about the complexity of people and in particular families. Read more

Published 22 months ago by E. Dennehy

5.0 out of 5 stars Deceptive cover much more brutal, powerful and moving
This is a powerful exploration of family life in Warrington through the 70's and 80's that hits hard. Read more

Published 23 months ago by Arkgirl

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful! Don't believe the blurb.
The author's prose is so exaggerated and gushing that it made me actually cringe with embarrassment - it just doesn't suit the subject matter at all. Read more

Published on 22 Jan 2010 by J. Marshall

5.0 out of 5 stars Harrowing
This book is so eloqently written that at times it made for a harrowing read but one that is well worth sticking with. Read more

Published on 3 Nov 2009 by kehs

5.0 out of 5 stars a thing of awe and beauty...
This is the best book i have read in aaages. I loved her first book 'Brass' - a dark and seedy tale of drugs, sex and forgetting set in Liverpool - but this, is a total departure,... Read more

Published on 10 Sep 2009 by NB

4.0 out of 5 stars Human Nature in a Nutshell
Susheela is Malaysian. When she marries a white man in a Northern town, she becomes pregnant with his children and settles into a life of drudgery and takeaways - a far cry from... Read more

Published on 4 Aug 2009 by S Brewis

5.0 out of 5 stars A sad tale but totally riveting reading!
My initial thoughts were what a beautiful writing style and straight away I wondered where this story would lead for Robbie and Susheela. Read more

Published on 2 July 2009 by loopyloo100

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