A master craftsman of the anecdote

One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to reveal the brilliancies too fully would spoil their effect. My copy is splattered with exclamation marks. For example, on page 65 the author is working on a piece of delicate silver jewellery that will become the ‘Two Turtle Doves’ of the title while singing along to ‘Hersham Boys’ by Sham 69, a punk band of the 1970s associated with skinhead violence. Exclamation mark. Two pages later, and years earlier, he is playing ping pong with Benjamin Britten. Two exclamation marks.

As intricately patterned as filigreed silver butterfly wings, the narrative weaves between memories of childhood (past tense) and the making of jewellery (present tense), interspersed again with tales and reflections of the near present (a bit of both). All is of a piece, however, each story providing the inspiration for each new collection of jewellery. This is a highly-wrought achievement.

The book has no genre, describing itself as a ‘Memoir of Making Things’. Those expecting a polite, perhaps even genteel stroll through a high-end world of necklaces, earrings, lockets and so forth will be taken aback. It’s a miracle that Alex Monroe ever lived long enough to be anything at all, let alone a memoirist: by the age of 14 he has fallen from the top of a barn while shooting ‘adults’ with a self-fashioned crossbow, seriously electrocuted himself developing photographs, and blown himself up making a gun.

He also makes bicycles and go-karts and clothes and tools and 50-pence pieces to put into the cigarette machine in the village of Woolverstone in Suffolk on the river Orwell. Monroe had an unusual childhood, and that is putting it mildly.