E L Parfitt

An emotional investigation into the meaning of friendship

Friends for a reason, friends for a season, or friends for life? Fran and Heather think they are friends for life, but life has other ideas.
As children growing up in working-class Edinburgh, both girls faced challenges including the death of Heather’s mother and violent abuse by Fran’s stepfather. Together, and with the help of their friend, Hector, they survived and the hardships formed unbreakable bonds between the three youngsters.
Unbreakable until, as teens, Fran and Hector fall in love leaving Heather not only on the outside but heartbroken since she loved him as well.
However, true friendship is resilient, and the bond holds as they grow to be adults, Fran and Hector the parents of three, along with Auntie Heather.
For Fran, life’s a grind working nights as a custodian, and it only gets worse when Hector is laid off. On the other hand, Heather has a stroke of good fortune when she’s left an attractive house and a large sum of money by a man who hired her as a caregiver/companion. Now she has the opportunity to pursue the university degree she’s dreamed of.
As Fran’s situation becomes more dire and Heather’s continues to improve their friendship is tested in ways it never has been before. The bonds are severed leaving all three rudderless without the ballast of each other. Has their friendship run its course, or can they overcome a toxic mix of pride, jealousy, indifference and selfishness fueled by circumstances beyond their control and reconnect?
A Friendship of Thistles: How to forgive your best friend with a heart full of thistles? is an emotional investigation into the meaning of friendship accompanied by a brutal exposition of working-class life in contemporary Scotland. This Dickensian novel is underscored by author, Emma Parfitt’s flawless prose, deep characterization and vivid imagery.… (mehr)

Temptation & Mozzarella is funny but inconsistent, never a procession of glorious lines but it does have some, a rare cousin though to the classic Good Omens. It’s set in the village with the highest number of Loch Ness Monster sightings, apart from Loch Ness, where you drift along in its odd, wandering conversational tale until you blunder into a line which flicks one of the most unusual of all involuntary reactions, the laugh out aloud. People text lol all of the time, hundreds of the fizzy little beasts broadcast across the land and sea, cheap and easy replies, every waking second but they don’t actually mean it, do they? They aren’t actually laughing, just being polite. If you read this book, you will be reminded of what that means.

T&M is also an alarming mess in the sense of its corpus, with frequent meanders and Chekov’s cannons, almost as if the observant author made notes for years of everything that amused them, every witty repartee, mad comment in the pub, staring too long at the wanton untidiness of student minds and then sketched out a plot and poured all their scribbled notes down its gizzard to fatten that skeletal calf into a body. If this was written in linear form, beginning at the opening word and deciding what to write next, I’m a Polynesian dugout flapjack. No, that would not be possible because there’s too much life experience in this, all those notations, memories, good friends we have and good friends we’ve lost.

I happen to like this style very much because it’s a look inside a bright and active mind, a generous leakage of humour in search of an audience, like a bougainvillea that deserves to have a few hummingbirds stuck to it. The problem is that most mainstream readers don’t appreciate this style, sadly. “Normal” readers can’t cope when you play around with format and use of language as if you’re actually enjoying being a writer. There they sit at home in the same chair with their daytime television faces, the comfortable vanilla blancmange of sameness – voters for eternal continuity and minimum risk who let the same newspaper tell them their opinion on it all, including what they should read and why they should like it. When a novelist ignores the constraints of genre, tries to be crab-shatteringly original, goes their own way until they are out of sight and, getting down to brass tacks, writes what amuses themselves (hoping other people will come round), it spooks these sad, lost souls. I can tell you now, there are millions of readers who wouldn’t get into Temptation & Mozzarella, not for a minute, not one bit, but they are all dreadfully ordinary, uncreative and boring. You can keep ‘em. Go on, stack your shelves with these people and try to tell them apart by their plain grey labels.

Now I’ve had a go at the general public, mwah, waves, I’ll have another go at the book. Much as I like a bit of mad-cap in my personal universe, it doesn’t work as well when I am distracted by irregularities or mistakes, so it should have been run past a sharper pair of eyes. There are three instances of “passed” when it should have been past, two of “lye” (a strong alkaline) instead of lie, then the Smith’s were driven… 1960’s (kill those apostrophes), he inherited from his line of successors (predecessors), ignoring both woman (women), incase (in case), Whiltshire (Wiltshire) and in the ebook, the degree symbol has gone weird after 360. You can’t say I haven’t read it. Fix these itches and re-issue, maybe?

This next unworthy observation that would be beneath any honourable and compassionate book reviewer (bad luck, you got me) isn’t about UK or US variations of English being right or wrong, otherwise both sides would rate each other’s books as zero, which would be very stupid. US English is fine and correct in the US and UK English is fine and correct in the UK. However, when you aren’t consistent and mix them up in the same book, readers blink. This is clearly a rural UK-based story, full of small town British style, from a UK-educated author, yet US variant spellings crop up, such as favour, gotten and meter long sticks. Is it aimed at the US market? If so, will they get the humour (humor)? There’s also Argentinean, which is an Americanisation (Americanization) of Argentinian yet, astonishingly, the UK spelling version of MS Office’s spell checker only has the American option, suspiciously insidious that, so it isn’t fair to blame any writer if the spell checker tells them it is correct. In 1982, the United Kingdom went to war with the Argentinian nation to settle precisely this question of how to spell their name. I might have made that up.

Now that I’ve listed everything I disliked about a book which I really liked, I’m so contrary, it’s time to re-state that this is highly original and funny in a sporadically sprinkled sort of way. It is additionally an indie book in the true sense of going off on one independently. A traditional production editor wouldn’t know where to start hammering these conversations and footnotes into a conventional plot, so it appears that stage was swiftly crossed or this polygon peg would have been butchered to fit the standard square hole. It’s often been said that chatty narrative styles like this can only be independent publications because a traditional publishing house wouldn’t take the risk on multi-faceted banter, but there is a precedent because they did sign Robert Rankin (now retired).

After reading this, I feel like buying the author a drink to let them know I got it. They sent their dandelion seeds off into the unforgiving breeze of the world, one landed right here at a crack in the pavement, it grew and it flowered, likeably wonky, not everyone’s taste, but now part of one reader’s rare botanical collection. The epilogue was entitled the prologue, not sure about that, but by this stage that was just another nonconformist pip in the banana juice pizza topping.

The summary? It’s a novel in the more-vocab-in-quotation-marks-than-description conversational humour style of Robert Rankin or Adam Corres, the good vs. evil line is Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens en reprise, all of which influences I like, so I had an easy path to this, then the subjects covered are pretty wide ranging (movie people, pizza recipes, invisible snooker, alien hunters, the homeless rich and many more). Everyone seems to be easy-going and unfailingly polite (including the Devil) and this is undeniably an example of UK student humour. The author is cleverer than the characters, but even so, they make for unpredictable fun. This story doesn’t take itself too seriously, doesn’t attempt to lecture and I thought it was an eclectic and good natured knockabout. It is very British, so if you aren’t from that neck of the planet, you may think there’s an encounter with another alien culture. Who needs to go to Mars? If you want to see something really alien, go next door (G.K. Chesterton). Did I mention that the extra-terrestrials are friendly and look just like humans, except their testicles are orange? Now, that would be an identity parade.… (mehr)