A Revolution of the Sun Book

In A Revolution of the Sun, Amnesiac Sam Caine loses his diary, his only hold on memory, in a greasy spoon. Rebecca Menotti takes a brief respite from her party-drugged life in London to visit her widowed father in Bristol. Hyper-intelligent dropout Joe Snow does his menial job in Mr Bone's Oxford laboratory, financed by the Al-Shalir twins. Tory MP Roderick Pastille (born Roderigo Pastile) fights gay rights at a Cabinet meeting while fantasising about transvestites. Cat burglar Martha Polkinghorne remembers her wrestling-obsessed upbringing. Solo O'Brien tries to raise his paraplegic child Ben on a Manchester housing estate, while the kids at Ben's school try to tattoo his head. Jack Knighton lives in thrall to his wife Miranda's demands. Slowly, as they move through 1997, their stories start to overlap and intersect. Coming after In The Place of Fallen Leaves and In A Land of Plenty, Tim Pears' new novel is large, ambitious and potentially unwieldy. The opening pages, as he frantically introduces all his stories in the first hours of New Year's Day 1997, are (perhaps inevitably) forced. However, as he gives himself the space to develop each story--and each has its own tone, its own pace, its own obsessions--Pears convinces that he can indeed carry off his ambition. Veering wildly between tongue-in-cheek satire (Pastile / Pastille), near-whimsy (Martha's wrestling-obsessed father), standard TV drama fare (the amnesiac) and the truly moving (Ben O'Brien), Pears nonetheless makes them all necessary parts of the whole. His plot lines are all ultimately about individuals, most of them loners, but in their attempts to make contact through the book there is a hope of something beyond individualism, beyond loneliness. --Alan StewartRead More