![]() ![]() Not to mention a long history of casual pick-ups, and cruising the local cemetery back in the day. On the face of it, we shouldn't feel much sympathy for Barry, the main narrator of this book: he's a closeted gay man who, at the age of seventy-five, still hasn't screwed up his courage to admit to his wife and daughters that he's been sleeping with his best friend, Morris, since they were boys at school together in Antigua more than sixty years ago. I'm also not entirely convinved by the utterly complete character change Carmel undergoes. ![]() It makes for an odd mixture and I never quite got my head around it. There's a curious diachotomy in here, in that while Barry wants to be accepted for who he is, he also has rather dated attitudes to gender and the role of women in life and society. ![]() ![]() The family are reasonabvly well presented, you get a feel for them as individuals as well as their dynamic. The chapters she narrates are in the past and are written in a stream of concious manner - no punctuation no full sentences. His chapters were told in the present, with reviews of past incidents. Barry is a very dapper, intellectually curious man and he is a most appealing narrator. Barry is in his 70s, from Antigua, living in London, married to Carmel and with 2 grown up children. ![]()
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