A Glasgow Trilogy
The Boy Who Wanted Peace; Grace and Miss Partridge; Mr Alfred M. A.
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
Distinguished by irony, compassion and the author's own dry wit, these three novels paint a memorable picture of life in the streets, schools and tenements of Glasgow in the 1950s and 60s. With a unique vision of loneliness, old age, sexual longing, hot young blood and youth's casual cruelty, George Friel's books explore a dark comedy of tangled communication, human need and fading community.
All these elements come together in the humorous parable of greed, religion and slum youth that is The Boy Who Wanted Peace; in the fate of old and disturbed Miss Partridge who is obsessed with the innocence of young Grace; and in the mental collapse of Mr Alfred, a middle-aged school teacher who is in love with one of his pupils.
The humour, realism and moral concern of Friel's work clearly anticipate and stand alongside the novels of Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney and James Kelman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even with the current convention-breaking renaissance in Scottish literature headed by the likes of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, there's something to be said for the previous generation's more traditional accomplishments, such as those of Kelman's fellow Glaswegian George Friel (1910-75). Compared to the e-generation's wild style, Friel's novels' dourly ironic, slightly deterministic plots are well-made plays. Typically fixing on a loner or eccentric for a protagonist, such as the aimless adolescent Percy Phinn, the staunch Presbyterian Mrs. Partridge or the superannuated schoolmaster Mr. Alfred, the novels array the supporting cast around them in Friel's vividly realized Glasgow. The separate downfalls of Percy, after discovering a bank robbers' cached loot, and Mr. Alfred, a victim of the modern youth culture, are compelling enough, but it's the surrounding characters that make the books hum with Glasgow's tenement life. In the best of the three, Grace and Mrs. Partridge, Friel orchestrates over half a dozen well-drawn characters in counterpoint with bank employee "Wee Annie" Partridge's progressively more disturbing obsession with saving the soul of her downstairs neighbor, 10-year-old Grace. With exacting realism and fine-tuned dialect, these novels are a testament to Friel's posthumously emergent role in Scottish fiction.