Natasha Cooper
The Ties That Bind
The Party
By Elizabeth Day
Fourth Estate 294pp £12.99
If you were to cross L P Hartley’s The Go-Between with Harold Pinter’s script for Joseph Losey’s film Accident and add some mockery of the excesses of the Notting Hill/Chipping Norton set, you might come up with something like the plot of Elizabeth Day’s latest novel.
Her first-person narrative is split between Martin Gilmour and his ‘pliant, adoring little wife’, Lucy. His contempt for her is obvious from the start. They met at the newspaper where he was a journalist and she a secretary. She was impressed by his impeccable clothes, pristine fingernails and air of not caring what anyone else might think of him. This was misleading. He cared a great deal about what his best friend, Ben, thought. As the well-structured flashbacks continue, we learn why.
The two met at prep school. A fatherless scholarship pupil from an unhappy and impoverished suburban background, Martin was being bullied when Ben swanned in to rescue him. Their friendship continued through university and on into adult life. Ben’s rich family embraced Martin and he did everything he could to
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner