He tries not to get the three confused.
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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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SEE YOU AGAIN, LITTLE ONE... |
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Home HIV and the Developing World Another World gay life on five continents God Would Be An Atheist Fiction Opinion Reviews martin@martinforeman.com Appeal to your wallet:  26 January 2004 World Copyright © Martin Foreman |
Those of us lucky enough to travel widely, and with an inner as well as an outer life, are subject to occasional bouts of disorientation. I once woke up in a hotel bedroom in Mexico City not quite sure who I was (no, I had not been indulging the night before) and definitely uncertain as to where I was. It gradually came back to me that I was in the Mexican capital but it felt like several minutes before I remembered why I was there and the list of appointments I had that day. Only the other week, as the lights came up after Love, Actually, set in a familiar London (all right, Hugh Grant isn’t Prime Minister, but he and T Blair when younger look similar, have similar mannerisms and come across as equally insincere), I expected to walk out into a cold and wet Charing Cross Road before taking the tube home. I was mildly surprised to see that my companion and almost everyone around me was shorter, darker of skin and in summer clothes. Of course, I reminded myself, I’m living in Bangkok now… I was scarcely more conscious of my surroundings the other week when I flew north from Saigon (fashionably correct) to Hà Nội (linguistically correct). I was reading on se reverra, petite, a comedy thriller by the French writer Exbrayat, first published in 1964, and picked up in a secondhand bookshop in Northern Thailand. See you again, little one took me back to London, although a London more reminiscent of the 1930s than the 1960s. At the heart of the story was Malcolm McNamara, a tall, bluff, bagpipe-playing sheep-breeder from the Scottish village of Tomintoul, who falls in love with a nightclub singer and incidentally gets involved with the Soho drug-dealers around her. It’s a simple tale, told in the style of Leslie Charteris (creator of The Saint) and other thriller writers of the period, although Exbrayat's trademark is plodding humour, as when McNamara objects to paying a taxi-driver one pound eight shillings for the fare to Soho from St Pancras.
Sam Bloom, the proprietor, re-enters the hotel with McNamara, his new guest. Armitage wonders how his demand for payment has led to a theological brawl, no tip and loss of two shillings absent-mindedly given to a Salvation Army woman for donations. Later, confusion repeatedly results from McNamara's habit of playing the bagpipes at every possible opportunity. You get the picture. Cliché was Exbrayat’s strong point. Scotsmen are mean and London cabbies are apt to throw their hats to the ground and stamp on them in rage. Elsewhere in the book we are reminded bagpipes produce an awful sound, gangsters have black hearts and shoot unerringly to kill and London detectives are either slow but smart or slow and stupid. It is ten years since I last read an Exbrayat. Of the books I remember, two featured Imogene McCarthy a battleaxe who terrorises the inhabitants of the Scottish town of Crieff (near where I spent my infancy) but who is ultimately on the side of Good. Another was set in London clubland and another in Spain. I was, and still am, drawn to his work by the covers, typical of the Club des Masques series. The 1960s were a vintage period for book design in the UK as well – many an Agatha Christie in the Fontana series was sold on the strength of their covers, graced by the instruments of murder and primary clues. Exbrayat (his first name, Charles, never appears on the covers) was born in 1906 and died in 1989. He wrote over a hundred books and gave his name to a literary prize. How many of them are set in France, I do not know, but I suspect that most are not and he specialised in offering his readers what were at the time exotic settings. Presumably he visited some of the places he wrote about, and, with some exceptions, his knowledge of streets and transport systems seems to have been accurate and will have impressed his readers, while his clichéd characterisations and implausible plots satisfied their need for safe adventure. Certainly, on se reverra, petite… satisfied this reader. Its simple French absorbed the 90 minute flight and a good hour that night before I fell asleep. I was amused and intrigued and happy spotting lacunae in the writer's knowledge of British life. And no, I didn’t think I was back in London, but I was in that perfect place where a book, irrespective of its faults, demands the reader's entire attention and the real world is very far away. On se reverra, Exbrayat... |
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