Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy.
Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy. Having read the first piece, ‘Archie and the Birds’, about a cheery forty-something bachelor living with his mother who communicates with her by way of a walkie-talkie, and grimly despatched the third, ‘Archie and the Woman’, in which our man marries a fellow dog-walker, I was about to write the whole thing off as an exercise in the higher whimsy when I came across a fourth, and much longer, piece called ‘The Girt Pike.’
Here an 11-year-old boy named Robert, local accent not yet borne away on the Estuarine tide, brings in a yard-long monster that has spent years chewing up the ducklings in Mrs Rendall’s pond.
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