- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: PaperBooks Publishing; First Edition edition (30 Aug 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0955109477
- ISBN-13: 978-0955109478
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 583,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Snowing And Greening Of Thomas Passmore
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Something strange has happened to Thomas Passmore. Waking from a warm Australian beach, he finds himself at Heathrow Airport on a winter's morning, only he can't remember getting there. Burdened with emotional baggage and an unshakable sense of deja vu, Thomas tries to piece together fragments of his life that he's just not sure he should be remembering at all...Tom, a museum curator, walks in the shadow of the past. Haunted by his father's suicide, his mother's rejection and by vivid dreams of a figure from his past, he must now learn to live fully in the present or remain a sleepwalker forever. His increasingly bizarre journey - set against the ebb and flow of the sea, the rush of motorway traffic; against urban and rural landscapes - takes him through childhood, a self-destructive adolescence steeped in the mystery of his father's suicide, and into a world where one man's struggle to live again is as timeless as the struggle between winter and spring, night and day.
About the Author
Paul Burman completed his teacher training in Wales and has taught in England, South Australia and Victoria, Australia, where he now lives. He has worked in a wine-bottling factory, a deep freeze, a plumbing warehouse, the Post Office, as well as being a maize `castrator' in the south of France... and he once had a newspaper round until a neighbour's dog bit him. That he has been compulsively reading and writing fiction from the age of six may be the result of a childhood indiscretion in which he was caught inadvertently telling the truth. Making up stories has remained a happy obsession ever since.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"...Street after street of identical suburban boxes, accommodating all-too-familiar ingredients: the same old beginnings and endings of never-never dreams and recriminations, TV programmes, mortgage statements, the burden of nine-to-five jobs, the stale defeat of drained love, the prospect of a holiday to the Costa Brava in a year's time, and a retirement plan in ten or twenty, or thirty - the cloned lives of Mum and Brian...from all of which I'm feeling remote, because Kate's begun to breathe a different sort of life into me. As long as I don't get lost, as long as I don't lose her."... (p.61)
The journey Thomas Passmore makes from Australia to his UK homeland as a settled married man, turns his life, past and present, upside down. We join him at times deeply involved in the action as seen through the eyes of young Tom caught up in the aftermath of his Father's suicide, his best friend's childish pranks, or a budding teenage love-affair, through to his adult journey to find a resolution to his incomplete past.
The narrative style and choice of language makes you feel intensely, as Thomas does. We are made to relive first hand his own experience of love or lack of it, and its development in his relationships from that of parental/child, boyhood friendship, lovers, to wife and that of his own children.
At times I felt so involved in the intensity of emotion that I could sense the edge of the abyss at which Tom teeters to and fro - and I was relieved a narrator viewpoint appeared, to help distance myself from the action as Tom becomes more and more obsessed with tracking down his former flame, and the chain of events become more and more confused, that ultimately lead to his rediscovery of life.
In this aspect, it reminded me of Goethe's 'The Sorrows of Young Werther', in which the joy and sorrow of a young adult living passionately, who becomes so consumed with his own thoughts he ultimately commits suicide. And in another way, it reminded me of the film version of the English Patient - it is poetic, artistic, visual and pulls me into its tragic story sometimes at a deeper level than I feel comfortable. It too, operates with a lot of flashbacks - snippets of impressions, and sometimes images which seem to make no sense. This technique could be off putting towards the end, where events seem to be highly abstract and chaotic - until the denouement makes it all become clear. And I sighed, relieved to be back to normality, and wanted to read it all over again, to make it all fit into place. Just like Thomas Passmore.
If you like love stories, tragedy, making sense of your character through their relationships and other characters' acute perceptions, if you enjoy puzzles and working out a good story, told in a compelling, contemporary language packed with intense images and sounds to delight the senses, and well paced with great narrative drive, you will like this. Everyone will know at least one of the characters or have been there themselves. Scary, and very rewarding.
The journey Thomas Passmore makes from Australia to his UK homeland as a settled married man, turns his life, past and present, upside down. We join him at times deeply involved in the action as seen through the eyes of young Tom caught up in the aftermath of his Father's suicide, his best friend's childish pranks, or a budding teenage love-affair, through to his adult journey to find a resolution to his incomplete past.
The narrative style and choice of language makes you feel intensely, as Thomas does. We are made to relive first hand his own experience of love or lack of it, and its development in his relationships from that of parental/child, boyhood friendship, lovers, to wife and that of his own children.
At times I felt so involved in the intensity of emotion that I could sense the edge of the abyss at which Tom teeters to and fro - and I was relieved a narrator viewpoint appeared, to help distance myself from the action as Tom becomes more and more obsessed with tracking down his former flame, and the chain of events become more and more confused, that ultimately lead to his rediscovery of life.
In this aspect, it reminded me of Goethe's 'The Sorrows of Young Werther', in which the joy and sorrow of a young adult living passionately, who becomes so consumed with his own thoughts he ultimately commits suicide. And in another way, it reminded me of the film version of the English Patient - it is poetic, artistic, visual and pulls me into its tragic story sometimes at a deeper level than I feel comfortable. It too, operates with a lot of flashbacks - snippets of impressions, and sometimes images which seem to make no sense. This technique could be off putting towards the end, where events seem to be highly abstract and chaotic - until the denouement makes it all become clear. And I sighed, relieved to be back to normality, and wanted to read it all over again, to make it all fit into place. Just like Thomas Passmore.
If you like love stories, tragedy, making sense of your character through their relationships and other characters' acute perceptions, if you enjoy puzzles and working out a good story, told in a compelling, contemporary language packed with intense images and sounds to delight the senses, and well paced with great narrative drive, you will like this. Everyone will know at least one of the characters or have been there themselves. Scary, and very rewarding.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Some memories are like photos - snapshots - that hang in neat frames at the back of the mind. Sometimes they shake at night and rattle a train of images into our dreams.
The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore follows Thomas through a fractured path of memories as he tries to work out what on earth has happened to him. One moment he is waking from an Australian beach, the next he is landing at Heathrow Airport. He is a man adrift, trying to stay awake as he tumbles towards his lost love, Kate. Behind him and before him are his memories of his life in England and Australia; his wife Elin and his children. Slipping through his worlds he remembers his childhood, his fathers suicide:
The memory of my father as a person recedes. With it goes part of who I am - my link with who I've come from, my connection to our past.
And his finding and losing of Kate.
Where's the Kate I've known? Where am I? We've both vanished.
Paul Burman, in this his debut novel, weaves a lyrical tale told with great love and tenderness that spins a magical tale of lost love dipped in sadness, snow and earth. The writing is wonderful:
The sea is the colour of granite and the sky is rusty-veined quartz, and between them they're grinding the day smooth, clean, polished.
The air rasps against the back of my throat, condenses and becomes an icicle growing in my lungs.
The story heart wrenching and mysterious:
I've discovered a world without real dialogue.
Paul pitches the pace right, with the reader wanting to see what happens and at the same time wanting to linger looking at the world that he paints. There is a great love of the land and this is used powerfully in the book. And it's almost as if Paul takes Thomas past live, his hurt and his love, and pours concrete over them, burying them in hard cold blocks that Thomas has built his new life in Australia on.
The connection between yesterday and today is getting too thin to trace.
During the book, like the flowers that break through the urban world covering his childhood landscape, the green shoots of Thomas' past life break through the concrete of the past until towards the end they are coloured white in snow and burst forth in greenery as Thomas' loves live again in him and become one with him.
If you love a tale well told, with wonder and intrigue; a tale with layers, a heart and a soul, then read this. It is wonderful.
The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore follows Thomas through a fractured path of memories as he tries to work out what on earth has happened to him. One moment he is waking from an Australian beach, the next he is landing at Heathrow Airport. He is a man adrift, trying to stay awake as he tumbles towards his lost love, Kate. Behind him and before him are his memories of his life in England and Australia; his wife Elin and his children. Slipping through his worlds he remembers his childhood, his fathers suicide:
The memory of my father as a person recedes. With it goes part of who I am - my link with who I've come from, my connection to our past.
And his finding and losing of Kate.
Where's the Kate I've known? Where am I? We've both vanished.
Paul Burman, in this his debut novel, weaves a lyrical tale told with great love and tenderness that spins a magical tale of lost love dipped in sadness, snow and earth. The writing is wonderful:
The sea is the colour of granite and the sky is rusty-veined quartz, and between them they're grinding the day smooth, clean, polished.
The air rasps against the back of my throat, condenses and becomes an icicle growing in my lungs.
The story heart wrenching and mysterious:
I've discovered a world without real dialogue.
Paul pitches the pace right, with the reader wanting to see what happens and at the same time wanting to linger looking at the world that he paints. There is a great love of the land and this is used powerfully in the book. And it's almost as if Paul takes Thomas past live, his hurt and his love, and pours concrete over them, burying them in hard cold blocks that Thomas has built his new life in Australia on.
The connection between yesterday and today is getting too thin to trace.
During the book, like the flowers that break through the urban world covering his childhood landscape, the green shoots of Thomas' past life break through the concrete of the past until towards the end they are coloured white in snow and burst forth in greenery as Thomas' loves live again in him and become one with him.
If you love a tale well told, with wonder and intrigue; a tale with layers, a heart and a soul, then read this. It is wonderful.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"My lips are shredded paper-bark glued tight with dried blood and resin. Hush. My swollen eyelids are sealed with sand and salt to shut the blinding brightness out. Keep out! Sealed tight against a storm of raining glass, shards of ice, the rending of metal. Sealed tight against a winter morning torn asunder, the hail of blood and bone, a day disembowelled."
If you're not one for poetic, obscure openings then you might be tempted to put this book down after reading the first page. Don't. As Thomas Passmore slips in and out of sleep and between past and present there's plenty here for you too. This novel, above all, is a compelling story: a brilliant, claustrophobic portrayal of the heart-rending inevitability of first love turning sour with rejection, and the echoes of that rejection on later life. Thomas escapes to Australia to forget Kate - his own attempt at "sealing with sand and salt" - but is drawn back to England by his mother's illness, with whom he has had a difficult relationship since his father's suicide. There's plenty here to think about as Thomas takes us back through his past, particularly the fundamental pull of memory, and the terrifying nothingness of death, acting as the unchanging, irrefutable backdrop to Thomas's questioning.
Paul Burman is a wonderfully lyrical writer, and the climax of the novel binds the seemingly obscure images together in a poetic unity rarely seen in new writers. Thomas dreams his way to a final resolution of his conflicting feelings for Kate and Elin that is perfectly symbolic - perhaps too perfectly, in fact.
All in all, however, a great book that manages to be both experimental and completely accomplished. More please.
If you're not one for poetic, obscure openings then you might be tempted to put this book down after reading the first page. Don't. As Thomas Passmore slips in and out of sleep and between past and present there's plenty here for you too. This novel, above all, is a compelling story: a brilliant, claustrophobic portrayal of the heart-rending inevitability of first love turning sour with rejection, and the echoes of that rejection on later life. Thomas escapes to Australia to forget Kate - his own attempt at "sealing with sand and salt" - but is drawn back to England by his mother's illness, with whom he has had a difficult relationship since his father's suicide. There's plenty here to think about as Thomas takes us back through his past, particularly the fundamental pull of memory, and the terrifying nothingness of death, acting as the unchanging, irrefutable backdrop to Thomas's questioning.
Paul Burman is a wonderfully lyrical writer, and the climax of the novel binds the seemingly obscure images together in a poetic unity rarely seen in new writers. Thomas dreams his way to a final resolution of his conflicting feelings for Kate and Elin that is perfectly symbolic - perhaps too perfectly, in fact.
All in all, however, a great book that manages to be both experimental and completely accomplished. More please.
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