Mr. Golightly's Holiday - Hardcover

Vickers, Salley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374214891 ISBN 13: 9780374214890

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004

Synopsis

The author of a one-time international best-seller, Mr. Golightly finds himself badly out of touch with the modern world, with his reputation on the decline, and decides to take a holiday in the historic village of Great Calne, intending to take the opportunity to bring his work up to date, but his plans take a bizarre turn. By the author of Instances of the Number 3. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Fiction readers with a sweet tooth and a high tolerance of Anglican whimsy are offered much beguilement in Sally Vickers' new novel Mr Golightly's Holiday. Set in the Devon village of Great Calne, it records the events observed, and in part precipitated, by Mr Golightly, the author of a work once famous but now tending to be overlooked, who has elected to settle himself in this community for a while. Mr Golightly himself, a rumpled, elderly figure arriving in a half-timbered Traveller van, is a familiar enough version of "the male author"; Great Calne, an apparently idyllic village with a wide range of carefully differentiated characters, but underneath seething with unseen discontents and rivalries, is itself another easily summoned trope--the kind of community now perhaps most commonly encountered in fictional terms in TV shows. This is handy, for Mr Golightly decides that the best way of dragging his great work into the limelight of popularity and relevance is to recast it as a soap opera. In the event, he makes little headway with this project because, of course, the affairs of the village become all-absorbing and gradually draw him in. And so things unfold, as the characters carefully established by Sally Vickers work out their destinies in a mixture of social comedy (some of it very sharp), melodrama, nature mysticism and visionary redemption that delivers far more than the opening paragraphs can suggest. Moreover, the precise identity of Mr Golightly, while not exactly part of the plot, is disclosed gradually and may come as a surprise to some.

It should be said that this is not really a novel, although it does offer many of the satisfactions of a novel. It is a fable with distinctly eschatological overtones, and as such runs the general risks of the genre, most of which are successfully negotiated. --Robin Davidson

Review:

‘Salley Vickers is a writer whose subtle intelligence and unobtrusive command of narrative I always enjoy. She sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand, and she knows how the world works; and these qualities are much rarer than they should be. She's a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.’ Philip Pullman

"Few novelists would dare tackle the theme of Salley Vickers's third novel; fewer still would pull it off so triumphantly. I am speechless with admiration." John Julius Norwich

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0374214891
• ISBN 13: 9780374214890
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368