Piers Paul-Read

From negative to positive

The late J. G. Farrell, author of Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, used to say that he never read novels by contemporaries: the bad ones bored him while the good ones upset him because they had been written by someone else. I do not know what he would have made of William Nicholson’s The Society of Others, but for me it is a novel that I would dearly love to have written yet one whose message is an antidote to envy. It is exciting, funny, wise and beautifully written.

The hero is a young man of 22 who, having graduated from university, remains shut up in his bedroom paralysed by a black cynicism.

I see things as they are. Nature is selfish. All creatures kill to survive. Love is a mechanism to propagate the species. Beauty is a trick that fades. Friendship is an arrangement for mutual advantage. Goodness is not rewarded, and evil is not punished. Religion is superstition. Death is annihilation. And as for God, if he exists at all he stopped caring for humankind centuries ago … So why leave my room?

The predicament of the ‘young adult’ who finds himself stopped at the buffers at the end of the line of the educational system, with an arts degree that qualifies him for nothing, is a real one and is here portrayed with a beautiful economy and precision. That a middle-aged author should so successfully enter the mind of a 22-year-old is impressive. In very few words he brings alive the narrator’s mother, father, sister, girlfriend and shows the dynamics of a broken home.

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