The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman

A dysfunctional family in an English coastal town of the late 1950s achieves chaotic free-fall in this mordantly comic, rowdy first novel (published last year in England) about an unloved, neglected boy´s furious search for identity. English screenwriter Robinson (The Killing Fields; Withnail & I) has created an ambivalent antihero in asthmatic, big-eared, cynical Thomas Penman, age 14 in 1959, a sensitive imp who writes poems to his girlfriend Gwendolin Hackett and savors Dickens and antiques. Caught in a tug of war between parents who loathe each other and sleep at opposite ends of their dilapidated Victorian house, Thomas manifests a hurt, darker side: he tortures crabs, blasting them to hell on homemade rockets, and, under the impression that beloved, comatose Grandpa Walter is dead, riffles through the codger´s pornography collection. The narrative, overspiced with four-letter words, swings from broad farce to domestic tragedy, from bathroom humor to self-discovery, with fairly predictable, peculiarly English results.