The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman

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Summary: Memories is a good, if disturbing, read
Review: An old man, a boy and his feces make Memories peculiar.

Thomas Penman, in Bruce Robinson's The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, has a bizarre problem.

He leaves steaming piles of his own feces hidden all over his house. He buries the "Shakespearean potatoes" under couch cushions, behind clocks, in cabinets and once, in a pinch, in his schoolmate's hat.

After reading Robinson's Peculiar Memories, it makes sense that this is Robinson's first book and that prior to this he wrote and directed movies. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, The Killing Fields. Were Peculiar Memories a movie, surely it too would be up for an award because it is a compelling read from beginning to end, if for no other reason than that it is so peculiar.

Intermingled with a touching, albeit weird, story about a boy and his grandfather, is a story about a boy obsessed with porn, a girl he is beset with and parents constantly in the middle of a row.

Unfortunately for the sweeter parts of the story, it's the nastier parts that stick with you.

Thomas lives with his grandfather, Walter, and communicates with him mostly through Morse Code. Their conversations are mostly one-sided because Thomas' machine is the only one that receives, as well as sends, messages. It was Walter who taught Thomas Morse code, a skill he learned in World War I.

It was in WWI that Walter became ill through an unfortunate turn of events that ended with the top of his head being blown off.

Since his brains had been shot out of his head and shrapnel was embedded in his belly, one might think Walter would have died. But he managed to live for 17 days - because maggots ate away the rot in his body - until Germans found him. After moving Walter, the Germans performed an experimental procedure on him, shoving his brains back in his head and placing a metal plate on the top of his skull. This miraculously saved his life.

Back in the United States, Walter managed to live a fairly normal life, with his hair carefully combed to cover the shiny metal plate on his head. Soon though, the wounds in his belly lead to fast-spreading cancer, and with it, impending death.

With Walter so close to death, Thomas finds himself driven to find the key to the cabinet where the old man keeps his collection of pictures of naked women before his grandfather dies and the treasure is lost. Thomas glimpses the photos for a glorious instant and he starts to see what sicknesses Walter's war injury has spawned.

Walter, possessive of his porn, knows that Thomas has been prying and tells the boy that he is occupying himself with the wrong secret. It is with this revelation that the real adventure of The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman begins and the mysteries unfold.

Robinson writes with great description, maybe even too much at times. He creates a story that is a quick read but that ends a little too neatly. The love story that winds its way through Thomas' struggles at home is just a little too cute and not very believable.

Despite these things, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman works because it is hard not to turn the page and see what sick thing Thomas does, finds or buries next.

Rating:
Summary: in breif...
Review: i enjoyed this book from start to finish (also check out the movie "the killing fields" which robinson adapted to screenplay and his own screenplay "withnail and i" )

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Summary: Laugh Out Loud Funny
Review: In its over-the-top sections, this book is hilariously funny. Thomas involves himself in downwardly-spiraling adventures that seem to have no possible good resolution. (Compare Thomas to Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim.") The trouble is, Robinson rehabilitated Thomas over the course of only a few months. From a child and young adolescent obsessed with an "awful cargo" of excrement in his trousers to a budding antique and antiquarian book dealer is too much of a leap. (And how is it that Thomas is an expert on the writings and life of Charles Dickens when his spelling is so bad that he confuses "anaemia" and "enema?") The grandfather, too, goes from hanging his testicles over the banisters to a kind of dying sage. This novel is best at its scatological and pornographic worst. It becomes flatly sentimental elsewhere.