Featured Reading Guide
Blake Morrison
Intimate and disconcerting, compelling and comic, an anatomy of the way things are, South of the River is the big British novel for our times – and a tour de force. It opens on the ‘new dawn’ of Labour’s election victory in 1997, and ends five years later. But this is not so much ‘state of the nation’ as state of our souls, marriages, families, hopes and careers – a sharp and sexy portrait of a dysfunctional group of characters, all different yet connected. There s Nat, failed dramatist and reluctant lecturer, falling for a younger woman; Anthea, an eco-friendly lost soul obesessed with foxes…
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Blake Morrison is the author of a memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, one novel The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, two collections of poems, a children’s book, and a study of the Bulger case, As If. He lives in London.
topAbout the Book
Intimate and disconcerting, compelling and comic, an anatomy of the way things are, South of the River is the big British novel for our times – and a tour de force. It opens on the ‘new dawn’ of Labour’s election victory in 1997, and ends five years later. But this is not so much ‘state of the nation’ as state of our souls, marriages, families, hopes and careers – a sharp and sexy portrait of a dysfunctional group of characters, all different yet connected. There s Nat, failed dramatist and reluctant lecturer, falling for a younger woman; Anthea, an eco-friendly lost soul obesessed with foxes; Libby, hardworking mother and advertising executive, the family breadwinner; Harry, Nat s friend and ex-pupil, a journalist on a local paper, with a guilty secret of his own; and Jack, Nat s blimpish but unexpectedly poignant uncle, who lives for fox-hunting, and runs a failing engineering company in East Anglia. Beneath the bright familiar world of Blair’s Britain, there’s a dark undertow of political and personal disillusion, of mythologies and urban myths that circle round our apparently comfortable lives. South of the River, a tale of five people, two rivers, and many Englands, metropolitan and rural, black and white, is gloriously readable and brimming with art and life.
topBlake Morrison interview/review
- What was the first book you remember reading? What do you remember about it? And was it that book which got you writing later?
The first book I can remember is Beatrix Potter’s ‘Peter Rabbit ’ – I suspect my mother read it to me before I was reading myself, and though there was plenty in it that stuck – not least the emotions (excitement on the one hand, fear of Mr MacGregor on the other) and the words (eg, ‘lippity-lippity’ and ‘scratch, scritch’) – I don’t think it was that book which got me writing. If anyone did, it was Wilfred Owen, whose First World War poems I read when I was sixteen – I don’t remember writing poetry before that.
- You’ve written a lot about childhood – in your memoirs, in your book about the Bulger case and in your poetry. Why do you think this is?
I think it was Graham Greene who said that nothing really happens after one’s first twelve years? Aside from Larkin, who called it ‘a forgotten boredom’, childhood is the part of life most people recall best, and in the most sensuous detail. Think of Wordsworth, or Heaney, writing about their childhoods, and the detail they summon up.
Perhaps childhood is universal in a way that adulthood is not. Certainly I’m always drawn back to my childhood. And the landscapes I inhabited then are the ones I still carry round in my head. The memoir I wrote about my father, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, is much more to do with childhood than my memoir of my mother, most of which is set in the 1940s, before I was born.
The emotional focus of Things My Mother Never Told Me is a period children rarely have access to, the time before our parents had us, the time before they were our parents. I was able to enter that lost domain because my parents had kept the letters they wrote during their courtship in the war years. I felt hugely privileged in reading their letters about that time. A bit of a voyeur, too, of course. But the trove of letters helped me understand my mother, who was, in life, something of an enigma.
- Do you feel you’ve exposed and exploited members of your family by writing about them?
You have worked in a number of different forms – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, essays, libretti, critical books, etc. Why is that?
For the full Q& A and links to further articles by Blake Morrison please see his website.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- What do you think South of the River is saying about modern UK society especially:
- Work life
- Race relations
- Marriage and relationships
- The Stephen Lawrence case
- Fox Hunting
- The Millenium
- Do you remember how you felt about some of the issues that come up in the book? How did you feel about these issues:
- Does South of the River accurately portray the aftermath of New Labour’s coming to power?
- The demise of Jack’s business
- Libby’s feelings about being a working mother
- Harry’s mocking article about Terry’s fox attack
- Guilt weighs heavily on many of the characters’ consciences do you think they are right to feel this way? Look at:
- How has Anthea’s troubled childhood affected her adult life?
- Is Nat more suited to Libby or Anthea?
- Do you particularly like or loathe any of the characters in the book? Why?
- Jack is subjected to a lot of big changes, both in his personal life and environment, how do you think he copes?
- Fatherhood, and particularly absent fathers, is a running theme in the book. Which characters stories are touched most by the subject and in what way?
Other Books by Blake Morrison
South of the River
Intimate and disconcerting, compelling and comic, an anatomy of the way things…
The Justification Of Johann…
In the year 1400, in the city of Mainz, a man was born whose heretical inve…
The Last Weekend
Set over a long weekend in East Anglia, Blake Morrison s new novel is the c…
Things My Mother Never Told…
In his acclaimed and much-loved memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father…
Suggested Further Reading
FICTION
- The Corrections ~ Jonathan Franzen
- The Promise of Happiness ~ Justin Cartwright
- The Rotter’s Club, The Closed Circle ~ Jonathan Coe
- A Revolution of the Sun ~ Tim Pears
- One of Us ~ Melissa Benn
- North and South ~ Elizabeth Gaskell – read our guide
NON-FICTION
- The Blair Years ~ Alistair Campbell
Additional Online Resources
And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Blake Morrison is on tour – click for list of events.
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