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Adam ThorpeAdam Thorpe
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
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Biography
Poet, playwright and novelist Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956 and grew up in India, Cameroon and England. After graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1979, he started a theatre company and toured villages and schools before moving to London where he taught Drama and English Literature. His first collection of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic (1988), was shortlisted for the 1988 Whitbread Poetry Award. His other books of poetry are Meeting Montaigne (1990) and From the Neanderthal (1999). He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 1985. His most recent collection is Nine Lessons From the Dark (2003).
Thorpe's first novel, Ulverton (1992), a panoramic portrait of English rural history, was published to great critical acclaim and prompted novelist John Fowles, reviewing the book in The Guardian (28 May 1992), to call it 'the most interesting first novel I have read these last years'. The book consists of 12 loosely-connected narrative episodes tracing 350 years in the history of a rural village and its inhabitants, employing various narrative forms from dense prose written in thick dialect to modern film script. The book won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize in 1992.
His second novel, Still (1995), follows film director Ricky Thornby's ambitious plans to make an all-encompassing film about the twentieth century. Pieces of Light (1998) describes a young boy's childhood in West Africa and the mystery that develops when he is sent to live with an eccentric uncle in the English countryside on the eve of the Second World War. Shifts (2000), a collection of short stories, explores interconnected themes of work and labour. Nineteen Twenty-One (2001), set in that year, focuses on a young man intent on writing a novel about the First World War. No Telling (2003), is set in 1968 and is narrated by a 12-year-old boy on the verge of First Communion and puberty, living amid a deeply dysfunctional family in a turbulent France, culminating in the 1968 Paris riots. His novel The Rules of Perspective (2005), is set at the end of the Second World War in a German museum.
He is also the author of five plays for BBC Radio, including The Fen Story (1991), Offa's Daughter (1993) and An Envied Place (2002), as well as a stage play, Couch Grass and Ribbon, first performed in 1996.
Adam Thorpe lives in France with his wife and three children. His most recent books are a collection of short stories, Is This The Way You Said? (2006); a poetry collection, Birds with a Broken Wing (2007); and the novels The Standing Pool (2008) and Hodd (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Drama, Fiction, Poetry, Radio drama, Short stories
Bibliography
Mornings in the Baltic Secker & Warburg, 1988
Meeting Montaigne Secker & Warburg, 1990
Ulverton Secker & Warburg, 1992
Still Secker & Warburg, 1995
Pieces of Light Cape, 1998
From the Neanderthal Cape, 1999
Shifts Cape, 2000
Nineteen Twenty-One Cape, 2001
No Telling Cape, 2003
Nine Lessons From the Dark Cape, 2003
The Rules of Perspective Cape, 2005
Is This The Way You Said? Cape, 2006
Between Each Breath Cape, 2007
Birds with a Broken Wing Cape, 2007
The Standing Pool Cape, 2008
Hodd Cape, 2009
Prizes and awards
1985 Eric Gregory Award
1988 Whitbread Poetry Award (shortlist) Mornings in the Baltic
1992 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize Ulverton
2007 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Birds with a Broken Wing
2008 National Short Story Prize (shortlist - 'The Names')
Critical Perspective
Adam Thorpe has an unusually cosmopolitan background, being brought up in India and Cameroon, and now living for more than a decade in southern France. A sense of place and locality is essential to his writing, and greatly enriches its preoccupation with the intangible qualities of ‘Englishness’. It usually depicts the lives of ordinary individuals being inexorably shaped by larger historical and topographical forces; the national experience of war and social change, the development over centuries of the English landscape. (He is clearly an admirer of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, and his novels have some affinities with those of John Fowles, who has himself praised Thorpe’s). As a writer, Thorpe is something of an all-rounder: his best-selling book Ulverton in 1992 has been followed by three more substantial novels to date; a book of short stories, three highly-praised poetry volumes, as well as continually perceptive critical reviews for national newspapers and periodicals.
One of Thorpe’s great virtues is his ability to imaginatively re-enter the past. This is seen most brilliantly at work in Ulverton, whose twelve connected stories extend through time, to tell, in a variety of voices, the unrecorded ‘history’ of this fictional yet archetypal English village. (Ulverton recurs as a setting elsewhere in his work). The first story is post-Civil War, around 1650, and the final one, dated 1988, takes the form of a film script. What strikes one about these stories is their feel of authenticity, the pressure of real lived experience, which draws out the reader’s empathy and identification. Among the most outstanding are the series of letters within ‘Leeward 1743’, and the peasant’s stream of consciousness in ‘Stitches 1887’. The book’s achievement is to seamlessly bring together social history, imagination, and a poetic insight into the emotional complexity of life in the rural past, and the diverse ways in which lives over the centuries have been determined by the community and its surrounding land.
Thorpe’s following two novels are by no means as engrossing: Still (1995) in particular is a demanding and difficult book to get through. As even the enthusing John Fowles admitted, its sprawling attempt over nearly 600 pages to bring film and fiction together results in ‘an endlessly jacuzzi of slang, film crew jargon and erudition’. Pieces of Light (1998) is also uneven but has some very atmospheric episodes, especially its opening portrayal of colonial life in Cameroon during the early 1920s. A small boy’s wonderment at the forest’s inhabitants, the river’s ‘evil mists’, the folklore of his African companions, are all superbly evoked. These memories both sustain and haunt him when he is taken back to England, staying at the chilly house of his Uncle, an author and mystic, in the village of – yes – Ulverton. At school, he is told that his mother has ‘disappeared’ into the forest, and this childhood trauma, along with his African experiences, is re-visited when he returns to the village as an old man many years later. The narrative then lurches into a metaphysical murder story, depending for its impulse upon the well-worn device of ‘found letters’, and the gradual revelation of their contents, which force him to reconsider his own identity as well as his mother’s fate.
Far more convincingly down-to-earth is Shifts (2000), an outstanding volume of often highly poignant stories, linked this time not by setting but by their common theme of work, its power to determine as well as to destroy lives. This thematic unity gives scope to a variety of world voices telling us their tales, such as a tyre mechanic during the early 1940s who sabotages a German officer’s car, with fatal but highly ambiguous consequences; and a hard-headed saleswoman at odds with her family’s feelings. An African immigrant in London during the 1966 World Cup takes over the life of a disappeared friend, and finds, in the casual racism that he encounters, ‘identity is just a voucher, a scrap of paper’. Particularly memorable is a ghost story with peculiar sexual overtones told by a veteran bin-man to a credulous journalist; and ‘Iron’, in which a handmade iron bench crushes a young German woman’s leg but later saves her son’s life after a motorcycle accident. The only story that topples from Thorpe’s usually scrupulous sympathy to sentimentality is ‘Sawmill’, in which a hard-bitten timber manager in Africa during the 1950s saves a baby gorilla from being sacrificed to appease native gods.
Thorpe enjoys a solid if unspectacular status as a poet, built up with his first two poetry collections, Mornings in the Baltic (1988) and Meeting Montaigne (1990), and consolidated by his most recent, From the Neanderthal (1999). The latter certainly plays with his most characteristic theme, of everyday lives shaped by larger forces, the upheavals of history played off against the slow evolution of the landscape. Poetry being an inherently personal art form, Thorpe often writes in this context about his own family life. ‘Sketch’ elegises a great-grandmother who ‘outwitted history’ by escaping massacres in Germany and Poland, to expire under a tree in England. ‘Lichen’ develops a metaphor for memory in the moss on a mountainside climbed over the years by himself, his father, and his grandmother. One of the most striking poems, ‘Fossil’, describes a visit to the ruins of the Nuremberg arena in Germany, finding a fossil ‘whorled into the stone / like a birthmark’. While all traces of the Nazi rallies have gone, the fossil remains. The title poem is a lengthy narrative (recalling William Golding’s novel The Inheritors), giving voice to prehistoric man: the struggle for survival, procreation, and an elegiac appreciation of the seasons’ passing: ‘So frail, this summer, / I would like to plait it / like grass, and keep my place / In the book of my life / forever…’. There is a note of rural nostalgia in Thorpe’s poems, and sentiment where children are concerned, but he has an attractive ability as a poet to ‘go beyond the recognisable into the mystical’ (Peter Porter).
Nineteen Twenty-One (2001), is characteristically divided between rural village England and the Continent, and a definite return to novelistic form. The context is that great social wound, the First World War and its aftermath, focussing upon the blighting of a generation’s lives as well as the yearnings of artists. Its central character Joseph Munrow is a would-be writer still struggling in 1921 with his own marginal if horrific war experience; and the Chiltern village where he goes to write gradually reveals to him its dark store of wartime trauma. Its men and women are crippled as much by repressive attitudes as by wounds, madness and bereavement. A tour of the Flanders battlefields becomes the catalyst for both writing the novel and for maturing into manhood. This is effected by love interest with the two contrasting women that he meets on the tour: naïve, highly religious Tilly, and an older German widow who subsequently follows Joseph back to England. As a grand subject, the Great War has of course been well explored in other current novels, most notably by Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker, but Thorpe’s easily bears the comparison: some scenes (notably a joyously naked outdoor drenching) bring D. H. Lawrence to mind.
Dr Jules Smith, 2002
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