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Product Description
Review
'an edgy coming-of-age story told in vivid demotic prose.'
--Metro
'This debut is a brilliant evocation of a particular time and place from a new author who deserves a wide readership.' --WBQ
--Metro
'This debut is a brilliant evocation of a particular time and place from a new author who deserves a wide readership.' --WBQ
Review
'A crucial new voice.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gritty, real and convincing,
By Brian Hamilton "brianhamilton14" (Scotland, UK) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Talk of the Town (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Oh boy, this is good, really good. I love these stories, writing in local language, first person, coming of age stories.
What marks Polley out from other writers is his use of visualism, he was a poet before tackling straight prose and he throws some crazy shapes, your synapses crackle with the descriptors. He does it well, the narrator is a 14 year old boy and never do the clever visualisations sound forced or unconvincing. The plot throws in the attendant violence, unrequitted passion and claustrophobic fear that teenagers encounter. This really is a cracking read, the bulk of the story takes place over the course over a couple of days as the narrator and a (girl)friend try to track down a missing friend . The find him but there is a cracking twist when they do. A really, really good read that deserves a wide audience.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dialect runs roughshod over remarkable prose,
By
This review is from: Talk of the Town (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Passing through the first page of this novel, I was struck by two things: firstly, the unashamedly poetic and wonderfully crafted language; and secondly, the wholly unnecessary faux-dialect in which it is enshrouded. Talk Of The Town is told first-person from the perspective of a harried and inquisitive fourteen-year-old boy, and throughout the book Polley maintains a voice which is at once believable, earthbound, and supremely heightened and self-aware. Polley is consistently inventive with language, always finding a new way to say something or illuminating a scene with a striking and novel metaphor.
On the other hand. In such tightly-constructed prose, Polley creates a language that subverts standard English only in its stretches towards poetry and never, to my mind, takes a chance on pushing towards that ungrammatical incoherence that might more accurately represent the stream of consciousness. This in itself is not a strategy to be criticised. However, in this light, it baffles me that the decision was made somewhere down the line to lay an accent over the top of all this. We can take it for granted that a teenager does not think or speak this way, not spontaneously, not really; so I don't quite understand why Polley saw fit to make the whole thing phonetically Cumbrian, which immediately creates a disjunct between the extravagance of the writing and the faux-realism of its presentation. Strictly speaking, Polley's not writing in a dialect; he's writing in an accent, and moreover one which does little to illuminate the script. It was a bit like listening to someone from Reading speaking in "Northernese". This was a huge barrier for me. I didn't find the language itself difficult to comprehend, as more the most part Chris is actually speaking the Queen's English if you look carefully enough. The problem really was constantly having to wonder why, if we already know this boy is Cumbrian, we must still be forced through all these awkward transliterations that add nothing whatsoever to the experience beyond reminding us where the story was set. Polley is good enough at evoking the trappings of region and class that he didn't really need to resort to such superficial trickery. That said, the writing underneath it all is top-notch. Carlisle, an oddly grim place at the best of times, is well-realised, and the shifting, unfocussed quests that Chris finds himself on are revealing and entertaining. Polley is respectful about the intelligence of his subjects and Chris is a subtle character, surrounded by recognisable and convincing archetypes of youth. The story is involving, rich and challenging, dark, sometimes violent and often funny, and whilst the accent riled me somewhat, it's easy to recognise that the book is very far from the kind of cultural condescention a reader might expect to find in such a wilfully 'regionalised' piece of writing. If you're wondering what all the fuss is about with the whole accent thing - well, I recommend you pick this up pronto, because there's a great book in here for sure. Otherwise, tread carefully, as you may find yourself with a bit of a struggle on your hands. It's more rewarding than panning for gold, certainly, but one wonders why he felt it so necessary to mix in all that grit in the first place.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
from near farce to tense drama,
By
This review is from: Talk of the Town (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Shortly after a despicable crime has been committed, young teenage schoolboy Christopher Hearsey learns that his best mate Arthur has gone missing. What he has heard from local tough guy Bobby leads him to believe that Gill, who lives down the road, may know something about it. Christopher strikes up an unlikely alliance with Gill as together they set out to try to find Arthur. But the next 24 hours will hold a few surprises, not all of them pleasant, for the two youngsters.
Christopher relates events of this last day before the new school year starts, and he records it in his Cumbrian voice, so it takes a page or two to acclimatise to the narrative. But the prose has a poetic ring to it, and we see the world through the eyes of the youngster as Jacob Polley succeeds admirably in getting inside the mind of Christopher. The eyes of an inevitably slightly naive lad, as he tries to put on an acceptable front of indifference while he is in fact helpless and out of his depth. The story swings from near farce to tense drama as events gradually unfold. Nothing is quite as it first appears, and one's heart goes out to Christopher when he finally discovers the truth, yet he stoically caries the day.
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