About a Man and a Boy (Man and Boy - Tony Parsons)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Man and Boy - Tony Parsons
Date:	19/08/01 (424 review reads)
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I’ve just discovered Tony Parsons.

Don’t snigger, you who’ve known him for ages, in case you’re old enough, from the seventies, first as a music journalist who has become a cult figure on the grounds of his interviews with The Clash, Sex Pistols, Blondie, Talking Heads, later, in the eighties for his journalistic work as a reporter for GQ, Elle et al, and in the nineties as a regular guest on BBC’s Late Review.

And in 1999 he published the novel ‘Man and Boy’ which was on the British bestseller list for 50 weeks! It was Book of the Year and won the British Book Awards. How could I not notice him? Well, not living in GB I don’t know everything that’s going on in your country and I obviously always looked and listened the other way when his name came up.

How then did our paths cross? When I was in London the last time browsing through Blackwell’s on Charing Cross Rd. informing myself about what was on bestseller-wise in the paperback section, my eyes fell on the cover of ‘Man and Boy’. OF COURSE, Nick Hornby’s ‘About a Boy’ crossed my mind as it was meant to do, I’m absolutely sure. I had liked that book immensely so that I thought this one might be good as well. One more reader that fell for the trick!

What made me buy the book in the end was not the sticker ‘signed copy’ - what is a signed copy to me when I don’t see the author signing it? I don’t feel holy shudders looking at an autograph - I’ve written my name innumerable times and nobody has ever appreciated it - shuddered because of it, more likely! (the reason for that deplorable fact might be that what I sign are school reports ;-)), so why should I appreciate someone else’s, the more so when it’s only a hieroglyph which nobody can decipher anyway?

NO, it was the other sticker ‘1 pound off’! I had already spent so mu
ch money on books that I found that argument more convincing than anything else.

The title didn’t only remind me of ’About a boy’, but also of the joke: Q: How many people are two fathers and two sons? A: Three: a man and his son and his grandson! The novel is told in the first person perspective, and ‘Man and Boy’ is really about three men, two fathers and two sons. The narrator stands in the middle of the line, he is boy (son) to his father and man (father) to his boy.

What does he have to tell us? The beginning of the first chapter is also a table of contents: “Some situations to avoid when preparing for your all-important, finally I-am-fully-grown thirtieth birthday.
Having a one-night stand with a colleague from work.
The rash purchase of luxury items you can’t afford.
Being left by your wife.
Losing your job.
Suddenly becoming a single parent.
If you are coming up to thirty, whatever you do, don’t do any of that.
It will fuck up your whole day.”

The author is frank with us readers, he informs us about what he’s going to deal with on the following pages, the last sentence hints at an unhappy ending of the goings-on, the choice of words prepares us for a conversational, colloquial, maybe funny piece of literature.

There’re no tricks, on the following 340 pages or so we get what he’s promised us we would. He tells his tale in a straightforward way, there’re no hidden meanings between the lines, he doesn’t play with the language, uses only very few literary devices. The enormous success the novel has had is certainly not due to its literary merits.

Where then does its fascination lie? It’s the subject, the collapse of the nuclear family. Yawn! You can’t open a newspaper any more without seeing statistics about divorce rates, single parent families, the rising number
of fathers with children and sociological or psychological articles interpreting these facts and their impact on the individual and society in general.

Have you ever had an emotional outburst, giggled, laughed out loud or wiped a tear away, while reading statistics? If so, you’re a rare specimen indeed, then your imagination is so vivid that you can see beyond the figures and create a world of them yourself, the average reader isn’t so creative, but reacts emotionally only when the facts are presented in a certain way, and that is what literature does, what words do. The author leads you to see the world with their eyes and you can follow them or object to their interpretation, in any case they make you react not only intellectually, but also emotionally.

We can leave it there, taking pleasure out of being moved emotionally, but literature can do more, it can rouse us into action, make us start thinking about our own experience and maybe understand our lives better, or even decide to change things.

Tony Parsons has taken one aspect of our life and by presenting it from inward - first person narrator! - succeeds in gripping our emotion. We feel with the protagonist and understand him even if we don’t approve of all his doings. The subject is very delicate and the danger of becoming kitschy is great; Parsons must be praised highly not to have fallen into the trap.

Interwoven with the protagonist’s story about his wife and son is the story of his own happy childhood in a stable, traditional family. “...the men who survived...found someone to love for a lifetime. Which was better? War and perfect love? Or peace and love which came in instalments of five, six or seven years? Who was really the lucky man? My father or me?” And today families don’t only break up, but new unions are formed, so-called patchwork families, which present new problems, “These days we have relatives we haven
’t even invented names for yet.”

I don’t find myself in any of the constellations Parsons describes, but what he says about the children who suffer from all the experiments in the fields of sexual freedom, professional careers, thoughtlessness, or sheer stupidity, touches me deeply. Being a teacher I see the little critters, the ever growing number of ‘divorce victims’, as we call them in German, every day, how they do cope bravely with situations they don‘t understand or try to and suffer or can’t and go under. Only the other day a physician who had to vaccinate school children told me that when he looked at the children’s cards he saw that only one girl had the same name as her parents. He pointed that out to the form master who informed him that the girl was adopted!

What will become of these children? Divorce is hereditary, some people say, not genetically speaking, but in the way that children learn how to cope with problems. Today they often see that instead of coping or at least trying to, grown-ups run away from them and after a while ‘give it a new try‘. There’s one character in the book who has scattered ex-wives and children all over the country, moving on towards the horizon where his dream of perfect happiness lingers...

Interviewer: “Do you think we can have it all, i.e., happy homelife, satisfying, challenging and successful careers, and a healthy relationship?”
Tony Parsons: “No - but we can try.”

His word in God’s ear! (again a German expression)

This was the second book I’ve read of the so-called chap’s or lad’s fiction, from the chick lit list I know Bridget Jones’ Diary. It’s not only 2:1 numerically for the laddies, Bridget Jones doesn’t stand a chance against the fictitious lads. Or is there one reader on this planet who has closed her diary with a deep insight
into something worth looking into?

A woman might think, things can’t be so bad after all if lads can write such sensitive, emotional literature. The New Man has already arrived! Or has he? Tony Parsons: “I thought it was a man’s book, but I was wrong - 95% of the letters I receive are from women. Women have made it a bestseller.” Aha.

So I’d like to close with an appeal: Men, read the book, women, make your men read it!

P.S. I won’t go into Tony Parsons’ CV. ALL reports and interviews I’ve read stress the fact that his protagonist’s life resembles his own in striking detail - so what? I explained in my op ‘Cat in the Rain - a formalistic interpretation’ that biographical facts have nothing to do in an interpretation of literature, they are only interesting, but don’t make a piece of literature better or worse. Obviously Tony Parsons doesn’t know enough about the theory of literature himself, otherwise he couldn’t have said: “That was my aim - to write a book that was everyone’s story. But to do that you obviously have to draw on your own life.” We wouldn’t have much from Shakespeare, would we, if he had only drawn on his own life?!

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