Friday 15 July 2016

Read in 2016 - 21: Penny for the Guy Mr. Olivier

What a strange title: "Penny for the Guy Mr. Olivier"! I had no idea what to make of this, but the sub-headline "A coming-of-age novel" caught my interest.



Mike Hogan puts the reader into the shoes of Mikey Cleary, a 12-year-old boy living in London. The year is 1963, many of the working-class community being originally Irish, with a sprinkle of Pakistani and other families in between.



Streetwise Mikey has learned that everything in life can be handled by bending the rules, sometimes breaking them, and by outsmarting "the system" -  those in power and authority - be it his teachers or members of the police force.



We follow him through various endeavours and adventures while he pursues his main goal: Getting enough money so that he can buy a bike. Sometimes he gets a bit sidetracked by making friends in high places (Laurence Olivier and Peter O'Toole, for instance; hence the book's title), trying to find out why his Dad never talks about the War, breaking and entering on behalf of the priests of his local church, working paper rounds and at other jobs, skipping school, saving the life of an elderly neighbour and worrying about his sexuality because woman's breasts leave him cold.



The thread linking all this events happening in the space of a few months is the Old Vic, a theatre in London where Mikey happens to rub shoulders with many a famous person from the world of drama.

A production of "Hamlet" is in the making, and everything comes together at the dress rehearsal for friends and families before the opening night.



For a time, I wasn't too happy about the way Mikey and nearly everybody else in the book approach life. But after a while, I began to understand, and to care. I really liked the way the author brings it all together at the end, and the message for Mikey (= for the reader): "...it was the bloody beauty of it that sent us all wild; the bloody, shining, shivering beauty of it. It was the love and pity of it. And the hate and the forgiveness, and the humanity, that was it. And that's what it was about [...]. Nothing else."



A lot of the language is Irish and/or Cockney slang. I didn't have trouble understanding the words in context, but for some, the glossary at the end of the book could come in useful. Interestingly enough, many of the terms I'd heard from Steve, whose Yorkshire family are of Irish descent.


I had not heard of the author before and went to check his website, where I found that the book has been renamed to "Hamlet & Me" and received a different cover.

21 comments:

  1. FYI - "penny for the guy" was what children called out for Guy Fawkes Night (Nov. 5) when a stuffed figure representing 'Guy' - was used to try to make some spending money before throwing him on a bonfire to be burnt!
    Guy Fawkes, Britain's most notorious traitor, planned, but thankfully failed, to blow up the British Houses of Parliament in London in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. November 5 has always been a night of bonfires and fireworks during neighborhood celebrations in England.

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    1. Thank you, Mary :-)
      We learned about Guy Fawkes at school (a long time ago, but I still remember), and in the book, Mikey and his friends dress up a "Guy" and go collecting money outside the Old Vic - hence the title. But of course I didn't yet know that before reading the book and therefore didn't know what to make of the title.

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  2. This sounds like an interesting read...and your review is an interesting read, too.

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    1. Thank you, Lee! I think it is also interesting in that it is a "time piece" - the reader learns a lot about life in London in the early 1960s.

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  3. This review makes me want to read the book. I'll see if it's free on amazon. I think the change of title is probably a good one. The original one is a bit strange.

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    1. It wasn't free when I looked now (to find the cover picture for my review). The new edition, "Hamlet & Me", has a different cover, too.
      Glad I am not the only one to find the original title a bit strange!

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  4. Sounds quite a strange book. I think Amazon often does free offers for a limited period to get readers involved with the author's work.

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    1. Not a bad way to do that. It wasn't so strange; it really was a coming-of-age story and all rather credible and life-like.

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  5. I can't shake the feeling I've heard of this book somewhere else. The title is too distinct to sound familiar if it's not! I'll see if it's available for download on my Nook. Thanks for the review!

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    1. You are welcome, Jennifer. If you find and download it, I'd be interested in your opinion.

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  6. Loved your words about the story dear ,it sounds an inspiring story I would love to read if find here

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    1. Thank you, Baili; not sure I can say I found it inspiring, but very interesting and entertaining.

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  7. I suppose the meaning of "penny for the guy" might escape most non-British readers ... Hamlet is probably more internationally well-known! ;) I have a vague recollection that I may first have got acquainted with Guy Fawkes traditions in Britain through Richmal Crompton's William books in childhood. But I read most of those in Swedish. (Can't remember now how they translated that exact expression. Perhaps by the Swedish word for doll or dummy.)

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    1. PS. None of the William books found for free at Amazon, I think. But two available for free at Project Gutenberg.

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    2. Do you recommend them, Monica? If so, I'll have a look for them!

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  8. Not really, Meike. Just pointing out that the two oldest ones are available for free even if not through Amazon. Quoting Wiki: "The Just William series is a sequence of thirty-nine books written by English author Richmal Crompton. The books chronicle the adventures of the mischievous schoolboy William Brown. Published over a period of almost fifty years, between 1921 and 1970, the series is notable for the fact that the protagonist remains at the same eleven years of age, despite each book being set in the era it was written in." Each book is usually a collection of short stories rather than a novel. It soon gets rather too much of the same :) I just enjoyed finding those two early ones for nostalgic reasons :) I think I had two or three in Swedish translation that had been my dad's (+ maybe read a few more borrowed from the library). The only William book I still have though is one hardback in English from 1968, which I think I bought in London in 1969 (on our first family holiday in England - when I was 13 going on 14). One of my first books in the English language :)

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    1. Oh! This sounds VERY much like it was the model for Kate Atkinson's creation in "A God in Ruins", the sort-of sequel to "Life After Life". Teddy, one of the main characters, is used by one of his aunts in what turns out to be a highly successful and very lucrative series of children's books, centered around Teddy's adventures.
      The 1968 book could be interesting for me, too, as it is my birth year :-)

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    2. Well, you could always download one of the free ones from gutenberg.org to check it out if you wish to get an idea what they're like :) - I think the only novel by Kate Atkinson I read so far is Human Croquet, which I read back in the spring this year. I never got round to writing a review because I kept getting stuck in my own thoughts... feeling that it was probably a lot more clever than I'm sure I quite managed to grasp... :)

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    3. PS The 1968 one that I have in print is William the Superman. No 37 in the series I think. (There is a list of the previous 36 titles included in the first pages of that book...)

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    4. "Life After Life" and "A God in Ruins" are somewhat more... hmm... consistent in their storytelling than "Human Croquet" was, maybe more "readable". I loved both books, and highly recommend them.
      I shall check out the William-books on gutenberg.org!

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    5. I might try those two as audio books in Swedish from the library. :) 'Human Croquet' I bought for Kindle on a special offer last year. I liked it - the beginning I found absolutely brilliant - but later on it got a bit confusing... And having finished it, I found it hard to summarize the reading experience, so never got round to a review...

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