#Blogtour Run to the Western Shore by Tim Pears

It's a pleasure to take part in the Blogtour Run to the Western Shore by Tim Pears.

About the Author

Tim Pears is a much-admired, prize-winning writer whose prose has been likened to Marquez, Faulkner and Hardy. His recent West Country Trilogy was a critic’s favourite. Born in 1956, Tim grew up in Devon and left school at sixteen. He worked in a wide variety of jobs: welder, librarian, reporter, archaeological worker, fruit picker, psychiatric nurse, groundsman in a caravan park, painter & decorator, and night porter in Devon, Wales, France, Norfolk and Oxford.

Throughout this time he was always writing, and later making short films. He completed a Directing course at the National Film and TV School, graduating in the same month that his first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was published, in 1993.

In the Place of Fallen Leaves was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award. Tim’s second novel, In a Land of Plenty, was made into a ten-part drama series for the BBC broadcast in 2001. Other novels include, A Revolution of the Sun, Wake Up, Blenheim Orchard, Landed and Disputed Land.

Landed was given the MJA Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. All of these novels were chronicles of our time, exploring moral challenges as they are expressed in the dynamics and politics of relationships and family life.

In the Light of Morning was a departure, set in Yugoslavia in the Second World War. Tim then embarked on his most ambitious work, a trilogy of novels (The Horseman, The Wanderers and The Redeemed) set before, during and in the aftermath of the First World War.

Tim is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Oxford, and is married to a psychoanalyst. He and his wife have two children. Apart from family life, he enjoys urban rambling and walking the dog (his first listener and a harsh critic) and rural foraging. Along with cinema, sport has been Tim’s other passion. He was a third-rate footballer and mediocre tennis player, and remains a poor ping-pong player. He continues to be an avid spectator of the ‘amazing human invention that is the game of football’

About the book

Run To The Western Shore is a beautifully written, evocative historical novel of quest and struggle - an ode to the land and Welsh folklore and a love story about the reconciliation of opposites in times of need.

Set in Britain in AD 72, Run to the Western Shore tells the story of a young Roman slave, Quintus, and Owen, daughter of the chief of a local tribe. Quintus, long exiled from his people, has travelled great odysseys in the retinue of a powerful man, and although he is a citizen of nowhere, he is also a man of reason who is fluent in many languages. Owen, imperious tribal royalty, is rooted in her native land (Wales) - a volatile warrior, fiercely attached to the natural world.

Promised to a powerful Roman by her father as part of a peace treaty, Owen flees during the night, taking Quintus with her. Hunted by an army, the two make their way across the country, living off the land, heading for the western shore…

Review

It's interesting how the author creates this juxtaposition of identity both culturally, socio-economically and even when it comes to gender roles. Quintus is completely enveloped in his status as a slave, which also serves as his identity. He has been trained to never query, to think beyond the boundaries set for him, to act without thought. This is particularly evident when Owen questions his knowledge of possible pursuit, routines and standard reactions expected in response to their flight or excursion.

Owen, both in identity and action, is a physical and visual representation of her country, people, the tribal nature of the times. What is law unto them is perhaps unlawful to the oppressor, ergo never the twain shall meet on grounds of common understanding. What both Owen and Quintus come to realise is that despite the huge differences between them, they have the commonality of useful commodity that links the two of them.

It's a tale written with the hand of prose, but never forgetting the reality of the historical setting. It's a story of connection, of footsteps that leave barely a reminder, and yet the importance of the two sets the tone for future removal of barriers. A stark reminder of sameness, regardless of the differences the world, the structure, and the variety of societal norms and cultural rules we think must keep us apart.

Buy Run to the Western Shore at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Published by Swift Press on 2 November 2023 | Hardback | £12.99. Buy at Amazon com.

#BlogTour My Own Worst Enemy by Robert Edric

 

It's a pleasure to take part in the BlogTour My Own Worst Enemy by Robert Edric.

About the Author

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (James Tait Black Prize winner, 1986), A New Ice Age (Guardian Prize Runner-up, 1986), The Book of the Heathen (W H Smith Literary Award, 2000), Peacetime and Gathering the Water (both Booker Prize-longlisted) and In Zodiac Light, shortlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC award. He lives in Yorkshire.

About the book

Robert Edric is a widely celebrated novelist, winner of the James Tait Black Prize and W H Smith Literary Award, and with nominations from the Booker Prize and Guardian Prize. He now applies his trademark candour to his first wry, honest and moving memoir of a now-vanished era of working-class 1960s Sheffield.

My Own Worst Enemy explores the relationship between a touchy, overbearing and tragicomic bully of a father and a son whose acceptance to grammar school puts him on another track entirely.

In clear-eyed but compassionate prose, Robert Edric vividly depicts this lost era of working-men’s clubs; of tight-knit communities in factory towns; and of a time when a woman’s place was only in the home. He brings to colourful life his family, both immediate and extended – over which hovers the barely-repressed frustration and anger of his own father.

My Own Worst Enemy is a brilliantly specific portrait of both a particular time and place and a universal story of childhood and family, and the ways they can go right or wrong.

Review

I think it's important to view the minutiae of Edric's relationship with his father and his roots from a broader perspective. When you grow up in working class surroundings in a working class family and endeavour to 'better' yourself, and I say that with the greatest irony, because the class structures determine that view of course, stepping outside of your circle and into a different one comes with certain advantages and disadvantages. 

A working class boy who rises from one class to another through an academic path, thereby possibly entering the middle class, upper middle or even upper - he enters a complex structure which closes and opens doors. The structure is also an unforgiving master. The working class no longer accepts the person who has entered the upper level, and the next circle will never fully accept the working class boy as one of their own.

It helps make sense of the fractious relationships and perhaps give a different slant on things. I've read the Guardian's elitist incomprehensible fawning, but then perhaps you have to have lived or seen it to make the right connections. Of course, in the end the only person who can talk with any authority on his memoir is Edric - I do wonder what his father's view on everything would be. 

The father who saw his son as the emerging elitist, the person looking down on him, instead of being proud of the accomplishments. Instead of acknowledging the drive and intellect, the aforementioned becomes the grain of sand in the eye that irritates on a constant basis. Of course that doesn't negate any pre-existing predilection to abuse those you allegedly love and care for, it just adds fuel to the inner anger. 

I found the emotional disassociation in the memoir quite interesting, but then perhaps that is a coping mechanism learnt very early on to deal with the contentious and dysfunctional relationship between father and son - one that still looms over him at times.

It's a dry, factual account of someone dipping into their beginnings. An attempt at closure, to comprehend, and of course give readers the key to the man behind many excellent reads.

Buy My Own Worst Enemy at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher ‏: ‎Swift Press pub date 24 Feb. 2022. Buy at Amazon com. Buy at Swift Press.