Broken Places - Hardcover

Wendy Perriam

3.09

100 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0709090986 ISBN 13: 9780709090984

Publisher: Robert Hale Ltd, 2010

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What’s your mother’s name?’

‘What does your father do?’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Where and when were you born?’

Eric Parkhill has no answers to such questions - or a single known blood-relation. A modern-day foundling, in a long tradition stretching back to Romulus and Remus, and including famous fictional foundlings like Tom Jones, Heathcliff and Oliver Twist, he was abandoned as an infant in a Croydon recreation-ground and given the name of the park-keeper who found him.

Growing up in care, with frequent moves from so-called home to home, his one refuge is the public library, where an altruistic librarian saves him from a dead-end future and eventually encourages him to enter her own profession.

Once established as a librarian, he works to promote literacy and literature among many disadvantaged groups, believing, as he does, in the therapeutic power of books. Yet beneath his busy exterior lie many deep-seated fears – fears he regards as mortifying and does his best to conceal.

Having lost his wife to an American high-flier, he decides to try his luck at Internet dating – with disastrous results - only to meet the woman of his dreams through a chance encounter on Christmas Day. This is Mandy, a redhead like himself, who makes cakes for a living and comes from the sort of large and loving family he’s always missed and always craved. She it is who encourages him to try to find out more about his mysterious past and his unknown mother, and, together, they embark on a journey of discovery.

But, just as the pieces are beginning to fit together, Eric receives two swingeing blows - the first of which is betrayal. The second is a summons to America, to look after his daughter while his ex-wife marries her new partner in Hong Kong. There’s just one minor problem – he’s petrified of flying and has never once dared board a plane in all his 44 years. His terrors mount to such a degree he feels he’ll die of fear before he gets anywhere near the airport. Somehow, though, he overcomes his panic and reaches Seattle relatively unscathed - only to be confronted with still more problems on the other side of the pond.

Yet what happens in the States proves a healing catalyst for both himself and his daughter. The latter is about to turn thirteen and one of the minor themes in the book is the commercial pressures on teenage girls to become Beauty Queens and Barbies. Eric is initially shocked that the ‘little girl’ he last saw back in England has now turned into a Lolita, but he finally succeeds in getting through to her and establishing a lasting bond. And she, in turn, salutes him for the courage he doesn't even realize that he has.

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Review:

Perriam is a writer of authority and skill, with a wicked ear for conversational quirks. --Sunday Times

Perriam is one of the funniest writers around. --Daily Telegraph

One of the finest and funniest writers to emerge in England since Kingsley Amis --Herald Tribune

From the Author:

People ask me why I wrote about a foundling. As a child, I often wondered if I was one, since I was nothing like my parents or siblings - the black sheep & rebel in a family of dutiful Catholic conformists; the only one who left the Church or got divorced. My mother frequently said: "I don't know how I ever had you?", thus confirming my suspicions!

But my main aim in writing Broken Places was to explore how fear arises from too much loss and trauma, especially at an early age. Eric spends sixteen years in care, with frequent moves from so-called home to home. Abuse, bullying and drug-taking are rife, and he struggles with issues of identity and powerlessness. Most of his crucial life-decisions are made by social workers, and he becomes a passive pawn, with no "voice" and no security. Is it any wonder that he develops fears in later life?

Despite such serious themes, I wrote the book as a comedy. Fear itself has many humorous aspects - though admittedly not for the sufferers! Eric's fear of flying drives him to farcical lengths, when he's forced to board a plane for the first time in his life. He's convinced that the woman sitting next to him - a devout Muslim in a niquab - is actually a terrorist in disguise. And he refuses to budge from his cramped, confining seat, for fear that if he walks around the aircraft, it might overbalance and cause a fatal crash.

I've combined comedy with challenging subject matter in several of my previous novels - "Fifty-Minute Hour", for example, in which one of the characters keeps a Disaster Scrapbook and takes a toy snake to bed! It's not just to sugar the pill, but because humour itself is a fascinating subject. It's been used since time immemorial to counter all the threats to our existence: illness, natural disasters, emotional catastrophes and, ultimately, death itself.

Given such grave threats, is it any wonder that fear is so widespread and such a fundamental force in human affairs? As far back as the fourth century BC, Hippocrates recognised it as one of the most common of emotions, and Avicenna, the Arabian physician and philosopher, born around 980AD, emphasised "the great fear of things that aren't frightening", which he had often observed in his patients. And, because fear is frequently hidden, as a source of shame and embarrassment, any author interested in people's inner lives will find such `secrets' intriguing.

"Broken Places" is written through the voice of a man - a difficult challenge for a female. Of course, both sexes have far more in common than the comparatively minor things that divide them, and Jung's exploration of the `animus' and `anima' famously emphasized the `opposites' within both men and women. I'm certainly aware of my own male shadow-self. As a child, I longed to be a boy and always played the male parts in childhood games. The female role-models offered to me in the male-dominated1950s seemed constricting in the extreme: the submissive, docile Blessed Virgin Mary; the pretty but passive, powerless wife and mother. Even now, I dislike many of the things associated with femininity - shopping, fashion, make-up, high heels, home-making. And I feel a deep sympathy for men, who, regardless of the circumstances, are expected to be strong, powerful and fearless. A woman may flee from a spider or scream at a mouse, but a man who does likewise will be laughed to scorn.

Writing Broken Places involved me in a steep learning curve. Knowing nothing about foundlings or children's homes, I had to get down to some serious research. I was shocked by what I learned about the care-system; described in a recent report as "an educational and health hazard" and a "source of national shame". Many of those in care have already suffered every sort of adversity since birth, often through a mere accident of fate. Yet the system penalizes them further, through lack of opportunity; frequent changes of placement (sometimes 40 or 50 moves for one child in a 10-year period), and widespread physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Less than 1% of children are in care, yet they make up quarter of all subsequently homeless people, and a quarter of the adult prison population. By the time I'd read around the subject, I began to question the whole basis of our justice system.

Libraries were another area I needed to research. Starting from a position of relative ignorance, I became increasingly aware of the huge range of events & activities now run in libraries, or by libraries in the wider community, including Bibliotherapy. I sat in on various groups, heartened and inspired by what I saw. I also attended Book-Club sessions in Wandsworth Prison library, since one of Eric's aims is to provide prison-inmates with some tiny means of "escape" through books.

Despite all his problems - with his girlfriend, daughter and ex-wife, not to mention his basic temperament - I gave the book a happy ending; well, happyish, at least. At last, he dares to hope. Hope is harder than despair because it requires a leap beyond it, but I believe my flawed protagonist does have what it takes.

And writing this novel proved personally therapeutic. My daughter had recently died of tongue-cancer, leaving two small sons, whose father had already died. To cope with my grief, I plunged myself into work, feeling I was writing the book for her. Sometimes I even had the uncanny sense that she was helping me from beyond the grave. Who knows?

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