Graham Norton (1) (1963–)

Graham Norton is one of those folks from the UK who seems able to turn his hand to anything. I’ve long been a fan of his talk show- he is a genius at putting even balky Americans at ease and he exudes good nature. So when I heard he’d written several books (his first, Holding, a prize winner) I knew I’d have to read them.
This was unexpected. Extremely well-written, which I did expect, but dark in a truly creepy way.
I don’t want to get too much into the plot for fear of spoiling it, show more but suffice to say, isolated areas near moors are involved, plus a cast of seriously sad and disturbed people. It all starts out seeming like a nice generational story, but as it goes on and the fibres get tangled about, the fog rolls in and suddenly you find yourself in a gothic horror.
Expertly switching between present and past keeps things pulling you along, until the final, somewhat rushed, ending.
A fun ride and it kept me up well past my bedtime to get to the end.
It’s high residue, too- the location is one that sticks in your head and I can almost feel the damp seeping from the walls, the despair in the wallpaper…
I did get the feeling the ending was squashed in as if the author was racing to finish the tale but I can understand the impulse as the reader races on, too.
Well worth a read and now I shall have to go read his others. Such a clever fellow and my goodness he is full of energy. Like Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, someone I would like at my ideal dinner table. show less

Orphaned at a young age, Frances Howe is brought up by severely religious relatives, her only joy is with her best friend Norah. When Norah leaves Cork for London, Frankie is married off to a older man but when her marriage breaks down she joins Norah. Taken up by a predatory agent, Frankie is left in New York with no money and no way to return to her previous life so she makes the most of it. She falls in love with an artist and takes over a small restaurant however, after the ravages of show more AIDS, her world falls apart.
As with all Norton's books, there is a genuinely warm heart at the core here. The story is partly about the Irish diaspora but also about the history of LGBTQ lives through from the fifties to the AIDS era and, without being preachy, Norton makes his points. It's a readable book, quick to scamper through but actually is more profound that you might think. show less

This is in many respects a perfect plane read—I downed it in one go on a transatlantic flight, and it was never less than readable while not demanding too much mentally from me. Graham Norton is very good at conjuring up the atmosphere of small town Irish life and the specificities of place. The plot, however, is much more Mid-Century Irish Gothic than I'd expected based on the blurb, and it didn't really convince me. I understand that it's just not what I'm supposed to be focusing on, but show more the where the hell did Patricia get convincing birth certs and baptismal records for Elizabeth? That would pass muster not just in 1970s Ireland but also for U.S. immigration purposes? The ending is also a bit too tidy, even as I respect Norton's refusal to get overly sentimental. show less

Norton’s novel started off strong for me: Damien, a 28-year-old gay Irish caregiver who works with the elderly, is sent by his agency to the home in Wapping of 84-year-old Frances “Frankie” Howe, who has broken her ankle. While attending to her, he hears the story of her life.

I found the first part of the novel about Frankie’s early years and young adulthood in West Cork Ireland quite compelling. This section covers the main character’s loss of her parents when she was 10; her show more lonely, loveless life at the rectory under the guardianship of her mother’s sister, Mona, and Mona’s unkind, rigid, and Bible-quoting minister husband, Derek; her training in the French culinary arts; and her being married off at age 18 to a widowed Church of Ireland canon in his mid-forties, who’s carrying on an affair with a parishioner.

Norton subsequently sends his young protagonist to London to live with her childhood friend, Norah Dean—and this is when he totally lost me. He introduces a lesbian subplot. It’s not the nature of the plot that was problem; it was the absolute tediousness of it. Since leaving Ireland for secretarial school in London in the late 1950s, Norah has discovered she’s attracted to women. She lives in Pimlico with a group of other girls like herself. Then there are pages and pages of Frankie working as an assistant to the aging, flamboyantly lesbian, and mercurial Van Everden, who fancies young women and then suddenly discards them with casual cruelty.

Norah was one of Van’s girls and warns Frankie about the woman’s pattern of turning on a dime. Frankie’s unconcerned; she’s straight, after all, and has made that clear to her boss—but Van cuts the young woman entirely loose on a trip to New York City when she believes Frankie has courted the advances of another woman’s girlfriend. Van deprives her of even a plane ticket back to London. Luck is with Frankie: she ends up marrying a handsome Italian and working at (and eventually becoming the owner of) an upscale French restaurant. At this point, the book was beyond repair for me. The characters had grown increasingly flimsy and the events more and more improbable, even silly—or maybe it was just the poor telling. Whatever the case, I couldn’t take anymore and quit.

This is my first experience with Norton’s fiction. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m disinclined to try anything else he’s written. show less