Book Review: Our Kid

If I'd written this review a day earlier it would have been very brief and not very complimentary. At that stage I'd read about a third of it and was utterly underwhelmed. Yesterday's train journey gave me the chance to finish the book in two further sittings and, as I've noticed before, doing this can help bring an otherwise tedious story to life. The things that had irritated me before were still there, but whether on account of me becoming more used to them, or flying past them more quickly, as I passed the halfway stage I began to enjoy it more.

Part of this must be down to the fact that a lot of the first half is written in Lancashire dialect, and I found this extraordinarily trite. Couple that with the author's reliance on clichéd phrases which litter the pages and the whole thing adds up to language that really stood in the way of my enjoyment of the story. He was, in his defence, writing the book from the point of view of a boy of 11 or 12 at a time (the late 1930s) when people really did speak that way.

Or did they? Did they speak like this:
"Billy, you look awful," said Pauline. "Let me make you a cup of tea."
"I've just heard of the death of my best friend," he said.

That's taken from near the end of the book and reads more like someone's poor interpretation of what dialogue sounds like that what someone whose best friend had just died would really say. "I've just heard of the death..." ??? Wouldn't he, more realistically, say something like: "Robin's dead. Lost his footing on Kinder Scout. He fell forty feet. I can't believe it." ? It's mostly all like that.

The book is lauded as a "wonderful...book that pulls readers back to that different world...A glimpse of a lost reality" on its back cover, but it took me back to the late 50s/early 60s when my own parents and aunties used to talk like that. Back to a place I don't really want to be reminded of. Simple souls leading humdrum lives and talking in clichés over the back garden fence.

That said, parts of the book were reasonably interesting and it had rare flashes of humour that had me laughing out loud, but once again it's the kind of book I wouldn't have chosen to read and although I joined the book club for exactly that reason - to have my reading habits expanded - this is another example of a book I've reached the end of and wish I hadn't bothered.

Finally, I found it deeply ironic that over the last two years I've read more fictional novels written in the first person than I ever knew existed before. In the past my reading has, completely coincidentally I'm now convinced, consisted almost entirely of books written in the third person. And yet here is a story that is essentially autobiographical (i.e. one you'd expect to be first person) and he's chosen to write about himself in the third person. Weird.