"...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)
Paul Burman - The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore - ISBN: 978-0-95510-947-8 (available from PaperBooks)
Other reviews:
The Independent
The View From Here Magazine - Mike French
Interview with the Australian Times
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; parent/child, boyhood friendship, lovers, 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 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.
286 pages, paperback, standard high quality paper, print, and I love the cover.
Available to buy from PaperBooks.
