It's not really about Tai Chi and Sex as the blurb suggests (One For My Baby - Tony Parsons)

Member Name: marymoose

Product:	One For My Baby - Tony Parsons
Date:	15/05/09 (105 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A good enough read, a nice enough story

Disadvantages: Slow, repetitive, quite depressing, some annoying characters

---Intro---

A few weeks back I was perusing the charity book list at work (25p for a book), and came across "One for my baby" by Tony Parsons. Although I haven't read his bestselling book "Man and Boy" I had heard the name Tony Parsons, and thought I might as well give it a go! I was thinking that his writing and style would be similar to Nick Hornby's.


---The Book---

The book was published in 2001, my Harper Collins paperback being published in 2002. My copy is 378 pages long. The cover has a picture of a man's shoe and a woman's shoe, and background writing with dictionary definitions of baby, babyhood, babying etc. My copy retails at £6.99, although as I said I paid 25p.


---The Story---

Alfie Budd is back in London having returned from Hong Kong and having lost Rose, the love of his life - details of how he lost her emerge through the story.

Hong Kong is where his heart is, and Alfie clings onto the past, spending the days wandering through China Town, and sometimes going out drinking with his 'best friend' Josh who he really doesn't like at all, but who is his last link to Hong Kong and to Rose. In London Alfie feels like he doesn't belong at all.

Alfie's back living with his parents - not a great thing at his age (34). Although Alfie's dad has shot to fame (and fortune) with his best selling book "Oranges for Christmas" (an autobiography, somewhere along the lines of Angela's Ashes), all is not well between his parents, and then there's his elderly nan (who he is very close to) and her failing health.

Alfie is a teacher, having been disillusioned teaching English at the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, and then Double Fortune Language School to rich Chinese ladies in Hong Kong. He finds himself as job at Churchill's International Language School, teaching English to an interesting bunch of students from a variety of different nationalities and cultures.

Amidst the chaos in his life, Alfie finds some calm in the relationship he develops with a Chinese family, The Changs, and Alfie attempts to learn Tai Chi.

To say more about the story would be to give away the plot. However, I should say that the blurb on the back of the book is misleading - "Will Alfie ever find a family life as strong as the Changs'? And can he give up meaningless sex for a meaningful relationship?" Alfie does have sexual relationships in the book, but I wouldn't say it is meaningless in anyway - in fact it is full of meaning really.


---Themes---

The story is really about family dynamics, about how families evolve and change. It's about love, love lost, and hope for future love. It's about painful memories, and overcoming the past and moving on. Really it's about relationships in general, but particularly parent/child relationships. It's also about cultural differences, and relationships across cultures.


---My Thoughts---

On the surface I think this sounds like it could be a really good book, and don't get me wrong, I did enjoy it. I did want to find out what was going to happen, and whether Alfie was ever going to find happiness.

However, the book is pretty slow going and repetitive - it took me close to a week to read it (which is pretty slow for me) as I just wasn't that into it that I wanted to pick it up (instead I chose to spend time staring at the sheep out of the train window). To be honest the constant reminiscing about Hong Kong and how wonderful it was and how nothing will ever be the same again (what with it being given back to China in 1997, and what with having lost Rose) gets a bit annoying really.

I was expecting the book to be more witty than it was, but really at times it was just so depressing I wondered if I could go on. There was one point though that I did laugh out loud as I thought something was funny - however I then finished reading the sentence and found it was actually not meant to be funny at all.

I think perhaps that there were too many characters in the book which meant that individual characters couldn't be developed enough. There were certain characters who were annoying - Josh, Larry the Lech and some girl called Jane at a party - I think that was the idea of them. But I don't know, I just felt like there was something lacking with some of the characters. I hope I'm making some sort of sense.

The ending of the book was ok, but mainly I finished reading it thinking "well that was ok, but what was the point really?!"


---Concluding remarks---

This was definitely worth buying for 25p (not the £5.59 it's currently retailing at on Amazon) - I'll be giving it back to the charity book list. I would recommend it, but only to get out of a library/borrow/or buy cheaply. Personally I prefer buying for 25p than borrowing from the library as I can dog-ear the pages! It would probably make a reasonable book for a holiday read.

I think I will probably give Parson's other books a go just to see, but I'm not going to go out of my way to get them. From what I've read I certainly prefer Nick Hornby at the moment!

Summary: One to borrow or buy cheaply!