Telling Tales

Format:	Paperback 95 pages

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Synopsis

Ten childhood snapshots from the master of the monologue. Alan Bennett recalls his childhood in a sequence of talks that are funny, touching and told in his unique style. Hampered, as he sees it, by a family that never manages to be quite like other families he recounts his early years in Leeds - 'a place where one learned early on, the quite useful lesson that life is generally something that happens elsewhere': there is hiking every Sunday, trips into town and teas in cafes. It's an ordinary childhood, Bennett's father a butcher, his mother a reader of women's magazines who dreams of coffee mornings and cocktail parties and life 'down south'. He re-lives family crises, early pieties and the last tradition of musical evenings round the piano, all these tales told with that wry observation and ironic understatement that has earned Alan Bennett a place in the forefront of contemporary writing.

Book details

Published
06/09/2001

Publisher
BBC Books

ISBN
9780563534365

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UK Kirkus review

'Life is something that happens elsewhere' reflects Alan Bennett sadly. Situations that might seem fortunate to others are merely negative to him - no bombs falling on Leeds during World War II meant no shrapnel for young Alan to collect. Anyone who listened to Bennett telling his tales of growing up in Leeds during the war, will recognize the self-deprecating attitude and remember the downbeat inflection and the north country accent that seems to colour his thoughts, for these are the same tales brought out in book form. Similarly anyone familiar with Bennett's plays, such as The Lady in the Van, or his television soliloquies Talking Heads knows that he is a brilliant verbal portrait painter, and the kernel of each of these ten chapters in this collection is the loving picture that he paints of his own parents. He tells us the moving story of two infinitely unselfish people and their serious, unworldly schoolboy son who longs to protect them from the hardships of wartime life (he even washes their dirty false teeth for them while they are asleep). And yet he can't help admitting guiltily that he feels slightly ashamed of their poverty and eccentricity in front of his posher school friends. If there is mockery in this portrait, it is the same compassionate mockery that informs all of Bennett's sketches of recognizably fallible human beings - tears and laughter are close in each episode. (Kirkus UK)