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One man’s transition from adolescent to adult during a summer by the sea recalls A Month in the Country
Benjamin Myers’s first novel since his Walter Scott prize-winning The Gallows Pole and switch from tiny indie publisher Bluemoose to Bloomsbury is an unexpectedly touching story of a friendship that conquers the barriers of age, class and gender. Set over a summer in the aftermath of the second world war, the book follows 16-year-old Robert Appleyard as he leaves his Durham colliery village to search for any work that isn’t coal mining: “an act of escapology and rebellion”. On reaching the east coast, he encounters Dulcie Piper, a woman three times his age who lives alone in a rambling cottage. They form an unlikely but symbiotic relationship, in which he gardens while she provides food, shelter and intellectual sustenance.
Dulcie is a lobster-eating, hard-drinking aesthete with a German shepherd called Butler. By turns verbose, eloquent, motherly and foul-mouthed, she might have come from central casting if Myers hadn’t given her such a richly imagined past and linguistic register. “Scones without proper cream is a disaster of apocalyptic proportions,” she exclaims, and one can sense Myers’ relish in bringing her to life. Continue reading...