Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 10 May 2020

Paperboy by Christopher Fowler

I imagine that Christopher Fowler might get a bit irritated when readers of this book make immediate comparisons with Nigel Slater’s genre-defining memoir, Toast. But however piqued he gets, it’s an obvious and undeniable one to make because substituting food for books results in a very similar piece of confectionary. And, I hasten to add, that’s no bad thing.

Paperboy, like Toast, is aimed at a very similar demographic and, if like me, you’re a child of the 50s, the references to the popular culture of the day, the social environments, the paucity of colour, variety and money will all be instantly familiar and will carry you back to your childhood on a wave of nostalgia – or possibly, in some cases, nausea. Actually, Fowler, is about 6 months older than me and so I share a very close relationship with the sort of world he describes. He’s gone on, of course, to have a pretty good career as a professional writer – his series of Bryant & May detective stories have become popular winners – and I haven’t but maybe some of the reason for this is evident in the memoir.

Born into a family balanced precariously between aspirational working class and shabby aspirational lower middle class, Fowler’s parents dominate the memoir and his life. His mother – the lower middle class element in the mix – takes the side of the boy who is hopelessly impractical with his hands but wants so desperately to be a writer, while his sullen, aggressive, utilitarian father is a constant source of heartache. Kath and Bill – Fowler always refers to his parents using their first names – were locked in a loveless, antagonistic marriage that, like so many emotionally barren marriages of that time, endured because of the children. Much of the source of Bill’s constant simmering fury was the result of the fires stoked by his mother, who never tired of dripping poison into he son’s ears about the worthless of his marriage to Kath.

In many ways this whole memoir feels like it is dedicated to the process of Fowler coming to terms with his father – the man who burned his books, especially the poetry ones, because he thought they were going to make his son a ‘nancy-boy’. A death-bed reconciliation of sorts was achieved but Fowler obviously still has quite a reservoir of bitterness swilling around inside him.

Bill does, it’s fair to say, come out of this as a hugely flawed and disappointed man. Weak in the face of his domineering mother, unable to finish any tasks, inflexible and ineffectually tyrannical. It’s no wonder that as a young boy Fowler looked for ways to escape from the family pressure-cooker and his chosen route was books and, later, film. Books became, however, the abiding love of his life and with it grew the desire to be a writer himself, a master of words. "My bedroom”, he remarks at one point, “ was the Battersea Dogs Home of books."

What Fowler is excellent at is the detail of the day-to-day ordinary horridness of stuff and this will resonate with anyone of his generation. Meat is cooked until leathery, "after which she would pour elasticated Bisto filled with tumorous lumps over it"  and this is followed by tinned peaches in what is graphically described as "nasal-slime" syrup.

Fowler’s ability to craft vivid and immersive scenes from his past ensures the book is a delight to read. The one small gripe I have is that I can’t help but feel he rather overdoes the cynicism and the sense that everything about the world he grew up in was rubbish or gimcrack. By the end you just can’t avoid wanting to urge the author to be delighted by something rather than continually disappointed. There was quite a lot to disappoint but it can’t have been everything?

I understand that this book went on to win the inaugural Green Carnation award for gay literature. The instigator and chair of the award, Paul Magrs, said  Paperboy was "about the forming of a gay sensibility – but more than that, it's about the growth of a reader and a wonderfully generous and inventive writer.”

However, and I think it’s important to say this, Fowler nowhere talks about the development of his sexuality beyond the typical and usual (heterosexual) obsessions with older, glamorous, usually big-breasted women. Refreshingly, he doesn’t make an issue anywhere of his sexuality and this is not the memoir of a gay man, it’s the memoir of a man who becomes a writer who also happens to be gay.

You’ll find copies of this book in both hard and paperback for very little money on the second hand market.

Terry Potter

May 2020