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Adam Thorpe: Still

I’m afraid that this one really doesn’t work. Rick Thornby (his parents called him Richard Arthur Thornby, so his brother calls him rat but he has dropped the Arthur for everyone else) is a British film director who now lives in the US and is pretty well Americanised, except for dropping into the Hollywood Englishman role when required. He wanted to be a great director but has ended up broke and with a string of appalling credits to his name. He is now in England, digging up his memories and Thorpe presents it to us in what he probably considers to be a stream-of-consciousness approach, consisting of fragments, drunken thoughts and the like, which makes for hard reading over nearly 600 pages and, frankly it ain’t worth it. As it’s Thorpe he goes digging for England and digging for his own past but, at the end, you are just glad it is all over.

Publishing history

First published 1995 by Secker & Warburg