Smashing People

Fishwick, Michael

ISBN 10: 0224061283 / ISBN 13: 9780224061285

Published by Jonathan Cape, 2001

About this Item

250pp. Complete Near Fine dustjacket with a very little wear to corners. Internally clean. Seven friends from Oxford and their adventures in the media in Thatcher's Britain.

Seller Inventory # 13292

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Smashing People
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224061283
• ISBN 13: 9780224061285
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature A - F

About this title

Synopsis

The story of six friends from Oxford and their adventures in the world of the media in the 1980s. A tale of friendship, betrayal, deals both financial and emotional.

Review

Well-known in literary circles as Publishing Director at HarperCollins, Michael Fishwick is now striking out with his debut novel. Not surprisingly, as with most well-advised virgin authors, he has turned to the material he knows best: the smashing people (smashing in every sense) of London's books, magazines and booze-flooded lunches, as they make their way up the greasy pole during the 1980s.

No doubt some will find titillation in attempting to identify the originals of some of his more unlikely and endearing characters, but for the rest of us.... Wilf Wellingborough is a hapless young Oxford graduate who suddenly finds himself heading the respected but dull Arts Unlimited--following the death of his girlfriend's father in suspicious circumstances after having just-that-minute sold the monthly to Wilf's childhood friend Jimmy Spalding. It's the kind of arsenic-laced lucky pill that Wilf is too fond of swallowing.

In time, not surprisingly, girlfriend Grace walks out; Wilf acquires as lover a ruthlessly ambitious New York-based editor; he loses the job, and finally finds himself drawn to Spalding's wife, and a Vauxhall squat which somehow leads (in a sudden crazy spiralling of the plot) to sinister deadly attacks. The 1980s are evoked in a litany of lost icons--Wayne Sleep, Mrs T, Ludovic Kennedy, Wogan--and invocations of "the new ruthlessness", "the new amorality", but the best and most real moments of Smashing People come when the forced, nasty humour of London's literati is left far behind, and we explore Wilf's roots. Fishwick's plan is to relate all this 1980s decadence in his characters' shared youth in Shropshire and Oxford. It seems true of his tale that, no matter what road these people take, they all lead back to Shrewsbury. There Fishwick finds a tenderness and depth that his smashing people can never provide.--Alan Stewart