{"id":1985,"date":"2012-07-16T06:25:08","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T06:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1985"},"modified":"2012-07-17T05:57:53","modified_gmt":"2012-07-17T05:57:53","slug":"a-trick-i-learned-from-dead-men-by-kitty-aldridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1985","title":{"rendered":"A Trick I Learned from Dead Men by Kitty Aldridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Jonathan Cape 5 July 2012<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

224pp, hardback, \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lesley Glaister<\/strong><\/p>\n

Long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, Kitty Aldridge\u2019s first novel, Pop,<\/em> was praised for its convincing first-person portrayal of a thirteen-year old girl.\u00a0 In A Trick I Learned from Dead Men<\/em>, Aldridge\u2019s third novel, we have another very individual first person narrator, Lee Hart, an apprentice undertaker in his mid-twenties.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story is set in a very recognizable contemporary England, the countryside faintly and troublesomely seedy with its hinterland of ring-roads and fly-overs, and its town, beset by chains \u2013 Tesco, Caf\u00e9 Nero. Even the funeral director\u2019s at which Lee works is taken over by the large and impersonal Greenacre\u2019s Funeralcare Group PLC.<\/p>\n

Any fiction based on undertakers will bring to mind the hit HBO TV series Six Feet Under<\/em> and some of the same kind of comedy attaches here, but this is a very different operation from that slick and rather glamorous US business.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare and Son Funeral Services is a small, local concern tucked between an old council estate and some playing fields on the edge of town; it\u2019s old fashioned, almost quaint in its ethos. There\u2019s plenty of dark humour to be extracted from the procedure of processing the dead \u2013 Lee is instructed that the body should be made up to look like \u2018an approximation of the good old days, Christmas morning after a nip of sherry. That\u2019s the look you\u2019re after.\u2019 And he opines, mordantly, that he prefers \u2018working with the deceased. They\u2019re better mannered.\u2019\u00a0 Nuggets of throwaway wisdom arise from Lee\u2019s chatty internal monologue: \u2018People are never what you think. Till they\u2019re dead that is,\u2019 and \u2018People want death to be posh, nice and smart, even though, of all the things we do, it is the most common.\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s necessary to have a strong stomach for parts of this novel. I had to clench my teeth while reading the description of how you make a corpse\u2019s mouth stay shut. Aldridge has done her research and has made Shakespeare and Son Funeral Services\u00a0 \u2013 and indeed her whole story world \u2013 very convincing.<\/p>\n

She is inventive with Lee\u2019s voice and has fun with his use of clich\u00e9.\u00a0 For example, his register shifts when he\u2019s with his pal in the pub where they talk mock historically: \u2018Good evetide, maestro\u2019; \u2018The ale beckoneth,\u2019 and he departs into frequent snatches of Spanish and French too.\u00a0 However, on occasion his verbal tics are rather too insistent. His abbreviation of well worn phrases \u2013\u2018end of\u2019 \u2018good as\u2019 \u2018same old\u2019 etc become irritating in their frequency and the more the voice strained towards this kind of perky vernacular, the more distanced I felt from the character and the more aware of the writer\u2019s hand.\u00a0 And there were times when the overly faux naivety of some of Lee\u2019s remarks – \u2018Constellations look easy on tea towels and mouse maps but they\u2019re complicated in the actual sky\u2019 – felt rather patronizing to the character, of whom I\u2019d grown quite fond.<\/p>\n

Lee is a sympathetic figure, struggling to remain upbeat despite his morbid job, his mother\u2019s cancer, his catatonic stepfather and the responsibility he feels for his deaf younger brother.\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s a tender thread of flashback concerned with memories of his mother\u2019s illness, which is carried along on an angry undercurrent about the quackery surrounding alternative cancer treatments.<\/p>\n

For most of the novel, poor Lee is on a downward trajectory, losing his job, being disappointed in love and suffering other serious losses.\u00a0 Listed like this, the subject matter may sound depressing, but the overall effect of the novel is certainly not.\u00a0 Delivered in a (largely successfully) quirky and original voice, often amusing and touching, A Trick I learned from Dead Men<\/em> illuminates and dignifies an ordinary consciousness in an ordinary little corner of England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Lesley Glaister<\/p>\n

Shakespeare and Son Funeral Services is a small, local concern tucked between an old council estate and some playing fields on the edge of town; it\u2019s old fashioned, almost quaint in its ethos. There\u2019s plenty of dark humour to be extracted from the procedure of processing the dead \u2013 Lee is instructed that the body should be made up to look like \u2018an approximation of the good old days, Christmas morning after a nip of sherry. That\u2019s the look you\u2019re after.\u2019 […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1985"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1993,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions\/1993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}