Wake up - Softcover

Pears, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747560315 ISBN 13: 9780747560319

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2002

Synopsis

"Early nineteenth-century France had Balzac, we have Tim Pears" - "The Times". "Tim Pears specialises in grand panoramas of our national life: teeming casts and multi-tracked plotting heavy with the scent of zeitgeist" - "Guardian". "His genius lies in telling a story"- "Daily Telegraph". In this, his fourth novel, the highly acclaimed novelist Tim Pears again creates a unique portrait of the world in which we live. John is a successful businessman, happily married with a wife and baby. Why is he circling the ring road of his city, unable to face his family, his work, his brother? As he passes the same exit again and again, his life unfolds in front of the reader. And as the story progress, it becomes steadily more sinister as we are forced to see the dilemma at the heart of this novel - how well do we ever know those we work with, live with, place our trust in? This gripping novel is a stunning exploration into what it means to live in these times and who exactly is the enemy.

About this title

Review:

There is a grubby, Lawrencean, earthiness about Wake Up, Tim Pears' fourth novel. Rotting vegetables, mud, urine, excrement, vomit and semen jostle for space in an invective first-person narrative. The central character John Sharp is an unnerving, unpleasant but often amusing raconteur. He's the misogynistic, misanthropic Oxford-educated brains behind Spudnik, Britain's largest potato dealers. Despite his disdain for the bulk of the word's inhabitants, he has unwavering faith in a scheme to cultivate vaccines in genetically modified spuds. The book opens with John driving to work having just learnt that two people have died in dubious trials of the prototype. Uncertain about how to break the news to Greg, his brother and (brawny) business partner; he becomes mesmerised by a ring road. As he spins relentlessly around it, in a subtle but insistent echo of the nature's own cycles, he starts to unfurl a highly questionable version of his life story. By the second page John has already confessed to lying and continually retracts, denies and reworks his own version of events, leaving the reader, as the silent, omnipresent interlocutor, to decide quite how believable any part of his story is.

Potato lore permeates his monologue--even seeping into a marvellously tuberous description of the Sharp clan's physiognomy: "We were a plug-ugly Anglo-Saxon family. Yes, we were. White and skinny or white and lumpy: that was the choice our genes offered us." Progeny, human and vegetable in John's case, is Pears' overriding theme. There's a remarkable neatness here. Pears is very adept at tidy but believable contrasts: John's scientism is marked against his wife Lily's New Ageism; Lily's adventurous cooking is in turn compared to John's mother's ability to drain food of its taste, while Greg's entrepreneurial vigour is sharply contrasted with their late father's inability to get beyond running a single fruit and veg stall. These binary motifs drive the novel; making John a robust, if sometimes obnoxious, figure and giving the whole thing a pleasing cohesion. There's a slightly annoying, final twist (Frankenspud turns out to be John's second genetic monstrosity) but this inventive and actually very funny novel asks serious questions about the responsibilities, and possible dangers, of scientific "progress". --Travis Elborough

Review:

'Haunting and drenched with a dark humour' Daily Mail 'A deeply unsettling novel' Independent 'Bound together with a thrillerish sense of doom ... makes bracing and refreshingly relevant reading' New Statesman 'Early nineteenth-century France had Balzac, we have Tim Pears' The Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0747560315
• ISBN 13: 9780747560319
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256