If you're familiar with the work of playwright and director Mike Leigh, and specifically the marvellously, comically grotesque characters in pieces like Abigail's Party and Nuts in May, then you'll know what I mean when I say that Louise Dean's novel The Old Romantic
Set on the south coast of England in and around Hastings and Rye, it concerns a fractured family, the Goodyews, whose 'patriarch', Ken, has death on his mind. Approaching eighty, and 'volunteering' at the local funeral parlour, Ken wants things in order now that he thinks his end is nigh. Long since divorced from Pearl, the mother of his two sons, Ken aims to die with his kin around him, but he hasn't seen Pearl for years, his elder son Nick broke ties with his parents when he went to Cambridge, became a lawyer and re-invented himself as a member of the middle class, and a further spoke in the wheel is Ken's current wife June, with her obsession with bus routes and bargains to be found at Lidl.
This is a very sharp comedy of manners - bad manners, as I've seen it described - and parts of it are not for the faint-hearted, but while it won't appeal to everyone's taste, Louise Dean has done a terrific job on the subject of class, ageing and family dynamics, and with her keen ear for dialogue, her social observation and her cringe-making characters, it's a finely crafted blend of the comic and the uncomfortably realistic!
