Sam Burcher reviews Simon Astaire’s latest novel And You Are…..?

This sequel follows seamlessly and swiftly on the heels of Simon Astaire's debut novel Private Privilege. Sam, the central character, has graduated with dishonour from his emotionally deprived public school, and is ready and willing to face the challenges of young adulthood.

Women and girls rule Sam’s world. And, there is an innate sensitivity with which the multifarious cast of female characters is handled. We are left in no doubt that women are to be protected and loved, but confused about how seriously to take them beyond being beautiful, pretty, or hags. However, there are signposts to strong women who are successful, and in whichever form they appear, their presence is valued.

As an agent to the stars, the author draws deeply on his own ethnographic experience of Hollywood to entertain us.  He cleverly plays with time to measure just the right amount of reverie for the grand days of a Hollywood past and the book’s present. Indeed, this mix of fact and fiction acts as a powerful stimulus to the reader’s imagination.

There are plenty of laughs as well as an eclectic coterie of friends, acquaintances, a snake and Telly Savalas. On the other hand, the emotional darkness of the first novel remains. Only this time, the grief of a boy’s separation from everything that is familiar to him is disguised as the death of his older brother.  His grief finds company with lonely Hollywood actors, who despite their fame are drinking alone at the bar.  Perhaps no one is as lonely as the stars.

Simon Astaire's second novel demands a second love affair. This comes in the form of the free-spirited and fragrant February, who is a conduit for the author’s detailed and sensuous descriptions of nature.  She is the muse guiding the juxtaposition between the city smog on the Scaletrix-like streets of Los Angeles and the scented forests high above the Hollywood hills. Such attention to the natural world would make the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood proud.

This carefully crafted story struggles to come to terms with middle class repression, but also calls for manners and humility in human interactions, something that is sorely lacking in society today.  However, little things remind us how lucky Sam is.  For instance, he can grab a London taxi in the rain, a luxury that badly paid youngsters in their first job can only dream of.

As I read this book one afternoon at Kentish Town, I couldn’t help but notice a railway worker trying to flap a pretty grey and white pigeon off the opposite platform. After much wafting with the lid of a large cardboard box she succeeded. I had just got to the part in the book where Sam is imagining his own death during lovemaking with his first love. I was reading about death, thinking about death and suddenly death was imminent. I looked up from my reading disturbed by the shrill whistle of the worker, who had not finished tormenting the pigeon, which was now perched upon the track. Its body convulsed with the electric current as the 18.30 to St Albans collided into it. As the train departed there was no sign of it. I dared to believe that the pigeon had flown away like an angel, or a Magi. Then, from beyond the track, I saw a white wing rise once, twice, and then no more.  Another railway worker looked on and flashed me a cynical smile. “It’s a useless bird,” he said as he made towards the opposite platform with a pair of plastic litter pickers at the ready.

This book has ways of connecting with the reader through different mediums. Music is used as a channel. So too is food, place and smell.  But it is the celebration and the tribulations of youth and the search for identity that connect you to the core of this book. It’s like the first time you hear a song and you swear, along with millions of others, that it was written for you. Ultimately, this is a book about the ambitions, with sensitive limits, of a boy who will not be broken by a system that does not always care.