1st February 2024.
ISBN: 978-166250049-7 (HB)
The opening pages of The Bad Weather Friend describe a large, heavy box being collected from a warehouse in Florida, USA. The package is a gift from Colonel Talmadge Clerkenwell to his nephew Benjamin Catspaw who lives on the west coast. Apparently, the shipment contains books, but the freight handlers suspect it may be some sort of illegal cargo. Truth is that the load is far more mysterious.
In California, meanwhile, Benny, as the Colonel’s nephew is known, arrives at the real estate office where he works. His tortuous childhood began with a violent father and indifferent mother, and this was just the beginning. His rocky upbringing continued throughout his schooling and beyond so that Benny might have wandered off the rails. Instead, he has grown into a decent, hardworking adult who always looks for the good in others. Yet even now he is dogged with bad luck; this morning he is inexplicably sacked by his boss Handy Duroc. The young man is beginning to think that someone or something is out to get him, but being Benny, he accepts the situation with good grace, quickly reframes and sets off to enjoy an unexpected breakfast at Papa Bears.
In the diner he meets his old pal ‘Fat Bob,’ a retired homicide police officer from Los Angeles. Bob agrees that bad forces are out to get Benny and he thinks it’s because his friend is such a decent human being. Bob advises his mate to stop allowing others to push him around, but Benny likes himself just the way he is and makes his way home. Then everything changes as the gift from an uncle he has never seen arrives and shortly afterwards so does Spike - the Craggle!
Prepare for a surreal narrative as the story alternates between Benny now and Benny before. Like waves that lift a swimmer high in the sea before rolling back into the vast ocean from which they emerged, the two timelines create a sense of doubt within the reader. What’s happening? Did that really take place? Can I believe in this? The giddy events mirror Benny’s own confusion as he tries to make sense of Spike and the adventure that unfolds after he meets this other-worldly creature.
The reader is sometimes addressed directly by the narrator whose wisecracks and critical asides question and make fun of twenty-first century life and society. At times the narrator punctures the fictional world he has created by commenting on the act of reading itself. These interruptions shift our focus; they question the difference between fact and fiction in the same way that Spike forces Benny to consider the authenticity of his “nice” persona.
The Bad Weather Friend is a terrific read. Moments of tension and horror are relieved by passages that are laugh-out-loud funny as the world Benny perceives to be real collides with the supernatural. The novel celebrates the potential for human beings to travel through life in a positive way, particularly if people accept but are not constrained by their limitations.
Contemporary philosophical
fiction with a smile on its face and highly recommended.
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Reviewer: Dot Marshall-Gent
Dot Marshall-Gent worked
in the emergency services for twenty years first as a police officer, then as a
paramedic and finally as a fire control officer before graduating from King’s
College, London as a teacher of English in her mid-forties. She completed
a M.A. in Special and Inclusive Education at the Institute of Education, London
and now teaches part-time and writes mainly about educational issues. Dot
sings jazz and country music and plays guitar, banjo and piano as well as being
addicted to reading mystery and crime fiction.
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