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Alan Franks, centre, at the book launch event with actors Charlotte Moore and Dennis Quilligan |
Franks’ tales of modern cringe-inducing manners
Journalist Alan Franks’ Going Over takes us into some very uncomfortable and often comical situations that are all to familiar, writes Jamie Welham
Going Over. By Alan Franks.
Muswell Press Ltd, £7.50.
INTENDED or not, the trench metaphor that lends its name to long-serving Times journalist Alan Franks’ latest novella is apt.
All the characters that feature in Going Over, Franks’ riotously funny, blacker-than-boot-polish vignettes, are forced one way or another to confront the kind of fears that most of us would rather lock away in Room 101.
First up is an unnamed anxiety-prone architect, who leaves his leafy West Hampstead love nest to venture to the wilds of Yorkshire, where his misanthropic father, and with him a mystery that has been troubling him for most of his adult life, awaits.
White rose emigrés who opted to swap cobblestones and Tetley tea for gentility and the bed-of-rocket brigade of north London, will feel a pang of nostalgia for the James Herriot-esque place names. Danby Rigg, Spaunton Moor, Egton Bridge, Osmotherley, Cravengate – the list goes on.
If you didn’t know any better you’d think Franks was in bed with the Yorkshire tourist board.
When we eventually arrive at his father Albert’s house (he is retreading a route across the Pennines he took with him as a boy following the shock death of his alcoholic mother), we find a wonderfully crafted character, described as harbouring an “inventory” of provincial moans, who blames his son for all the ills of modern architecture, carbuncles and all, despite him modestly claiming responsibility for just “a few studio conversions in Brondesbury”. Anyone with an ageing father could relate.
The pressure cooker of mutual resentment eventually spills over as we burrow to the dark heart of exactly how the man’s mother befell her fate.
Next up is “The Tarnished Muse”, a jauntier affair redolent of an early Tom Sharpe. Here we meet Sunday supplement profile writer Wendy Howard-Watt. She has founded a career on fawning, flattering, “puffing” up (and occasionally sleeping with) the stiffer end of the celebrity food chain. “She had nailed her colours to the mast of compliance and the ship was billowing along handsomely with the wind of good opinions” we are told. Wendy is tasked with interviewing so-called national treasure and “King Lear of his generation”, actor Sir John Templeton in his Cotswolds mansion. Inevitably it doesn’t go well. Templeton is incoherent and the only storming he is capable of is in his trousers.
Trying to rescue a dire interview/near crime scene, Wendy opts for more than a smidgen of poetic licence (becoming the guttural manipulator of the truth that so many journalists are thought to be). Needless to say, this unravels faster than a ball of string in a tumble dryer. Wendy is left disconsolate, compromised and contemplating how “disappointment stalks everything” she does.
From a wicked satire on showbusiness and the press to a rollicking family drama, “The Night Everything Happened” follows the exploits of twenty-something, yet-to-fly-the-nest philosophy graduate Nicky. He makes a mistake all of us can sympathise with – leaving a rather racy message too crude to print here on the wrong answer machine. Minutes later he has hatched a hair-brained plan worthy of Blackadder’s Baldrick. Corpses, detectives and “bambi-killers” all figure. It gets messy.
Both funny and poignant, Going Over works like a giant black hole. It pulls our lives into those of Franks’ characters, speaking to familiar hopes, dreams and fears.
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