- Hardcover: 276 pages
- Publisher: Granta Books (22 Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1862074623
- ISBN-13: 978-1862074620
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.8 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 839,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
Petit has steadily been building a reputation as one of the country's most accomplished thriller writers, and this lean and atmospheric piece will consolidate that reputation. Set in the grim world of Mrs Thatcher's Britain, Petit's anti-hero comes home from jail to Kilburn and struggles to recognise the place he left. His estranged wife is gone; his daughter is living with a wealthy record producer. Living in his sister's unprepossessing hotel, he is persuaded to undertake dangerous schemes against those for whom he took the fall. Petit's subject is the seedy criminal milieu of north-west London, with its Irish pubs and disenfranchised inhabitants. As a thriller, this delivers in no uncertain terms; as a character study, it's even more acute.
Product Description
O'Grady comes home from jail to Kilburn weathering the onset of a harsh new climate. This is Mrs Thatcher's Britain. It is a place he recognises, but he feels lost in it. His estranged wife has moved on and up, out to the suburbs; the daughter he barely knew is living with a wealthy record producer. O'Grady lodges in his spinster sister's dreary hotel. Alcohol and the random chances it brings begin to define his life. The only people who want to know him are aware that he is owed money by those for whom he took the fall. They offer him schemes, fantasies: he is expected to perform some action that will change lives. But O'Grady cannot make a decision and cannot act. Hard Shoulder is an evocation of the grey avenues and pubs of Irish London at its most hopeless, a semi-criminal milieu of the lost: north west London has never been more convincingly portrayed. Using and undermining the conventions of the thriller, Petit has written a book that deserves to stand alongside the best that the city has inspired.
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First Sentence
O'Grady, a big man once, stood in the empty carriage of the silver train as it moved faster through the long tunnel from St John's Wood into daylight at Finchley Road. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
O'Grady, a big man once, stood in the empty carriage of the silver train as it moved faster through the long tunnel from St John's Wood into daylight at Finchley Road. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
With 'The Hard Shoulder', Chris Petit makes a welcome return to the blistering form that made his debut 'Robinson', one of the best London novels of the 1990's. The criminal neglect of this literal 'masterpiece' ( recently re-issued by Granta) will we can only prey not befall Petit's latest offering. A taut literary thriller, an insightful commentary on the lives of the old school London Irish, an existential exploration of indecision and a noirish road movie, 'The Hard Shoulder' is all of these.
The central character O'Grady is an Irishman, who has just been released from prison. As the novel opens we find him making his way to his sister's boarding house (via a few of his old watering holes) in Kilburn. He has reconciled himself to a quiet life, odd jobbing for his devout sister and leaving the past well alone. But he is crippled by indecision, and rudderless, is soon straying from the 'Bleanyish' life plan he had sketched out for himself on the inside. Shaughnessy, a boarder at his sister's and a classic chancer (who has not so much kissed the Blarney stone as slipped it the tongue) soon finds out about O'Grady's past. Weak and indecisive, O'Grady, despite his distrust and dislike of Shaughnessy, forms an uneasy alliance with him. What follows is a compelling story of O'Grady's attempts to come to terms with his past and with a present in which he is anchorless and without bearings
Set in a North West London on the cusp of post war dereliction and the Thatcherite gentrification of the mid-1980's, the novel evokes a time of social change with deftness and great perception. A lesser writer would have ham fistedly crammed the text with references to this time period, Petit with his perfect pitch, his unfailing gift for writing the city, does not have to. He captures the contingency, the complete fluidity of the urban, perfectly.
Petit started out as a film maker, (he directed the cult British road movie 'Radio On') and there is a film makers sensibility at work in this novel. It has the structure of a film, he writes scenes with an eye for tone and the inconsequential but telling detail. His prose is taut and almost ruthless in its uncompromising rejection of the showy. The dialogue is effortlessly on the money (if Petit isn't Irish, then clearly he has sought their company - I write this as a Irishman myself) This is ultimately what gives such authenticity to the character of O'Grady. We watch him drowning in his own deep sense of worthlessness, crippled by an inability to act decisively, beset by uncertainty and the culturally imposed humility of old catholic Ireland. Yet for all this he is saintly too, a mundane saint, but a saint nonetheless. The novel ends with O'Grady going literally nowhere in a Merc, dreaming of a bright new beginning in some airport departure lounge, a metaphor for Celtic Tiger Ireland perhaps.
Written with such unerring feel for character, time and place, 'The Hard Shoulder' deserves a wide readership.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I don't know how many people there are who've read Petit's entire fictional output, but for those who have I think few would disagree this is his best yet. 'Robinson' is interesting, but unmoving; 'Psalm Killer' is a deranged, though very readable thriller; 'Back from the Dead' is perhaps best passed over quickly.
With this novel one gets a vague sense that O'Grady is dead and that the world he moves within is no so distanced from hell. The observations of Kilburn life are brilliantly done, an area in which before the war houses 'passed hands for £20'.
Do read this book. Though it is very depressing indeed - the ending is up there with 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' - there is much good stuff in it and one looks forward to whatever next this interesting writer creates.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Chris Petit's prose has an oddly hypnotic quality so that even when not much is happening it seems suffused in its own particularity. The setting to this story is Kilburn, which probably says something to those who live there, but might as well be any area of lost London: "O'Grady, a big man once," is how he is introduced and one senses the double negative of a man who once had physical heft as well as status, now reduced, and indeed, O'Grady is reduced, in ambition, in meaning, in ability. "Been away in America", is just a metaphor for prison. But O'Grady is owed and his indefatigable companion Shaughnessy is going to help him recover what is due. Shaughnessy is keener on the game than O'Grady, who would rather just leave it be. But Shaughnessy can't abide a lack of justice - that which comes by his own endeavour especially, and he pursues O'Grady and wraps him in a plot to recover money from those who have it. O'Grady is half in love with ease and would rather take a job serving and odd-jobbing in his sister's hotel - a bed and breakfast place, sniffing after Kathleen, the waitress, spending his days visiting his mother in her care home where they sit, she resolutely not speaking, him waiting for something, absolution, perhaps?
This has the feeling of an anti-adventure - slow-moving, gray, puzzling days, the level of intrigue rising almost accidentally. But it is also abrasive and ironic in the intensity of its lack of movement. It becomes more and more like a dreadful dream, bound to end with the sound of approaching sirens.
I know much of what I say above sounds tortuous, and some of it is, but at the same time one keeps reading, you know? It becomes a need and then, much to one's surprise, a pleasure.
This has the feeling of an anti-adventure - slow-moving, gray, puzzling days, the level of intrigue rising almost accidentally. But it is also abrasive and ironic in the intensity of its lack of movement. It becomes more and more like a dreadful dream, bound to end with the sound of approaching sirens.
I know much of what I say above sounds tortuous, and some of it is, but at the same time one keeps reading, you know? It becomes a need and then, much to one's surprise, a pleasure.
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