Smashing People Book

Well-known in literary circles as Publishing Director at HarperCollins, Michael Fishwick is now striking out with his own debut novel. Not surprisingly, as with most well-advised virgin authors, he has turned to the material he knows best: the smashing people (smashing in every sense) of London's books, magazines and booze-flooded lunches, making their ways up the greasy pole during the 1980s. Wilf Wellingborough is a hapless young Oxford graduate who suddenly finds himself heading the respected but dull Arts Unlimited--following the suspicious death of his girlfriend's father, just after having sold the monthly to Wilf's childhood friend Jimmy Spalding. It's the kind of arsenic-laced lucky pill that Wilf is too fond of swallowing. In time, not surprisingly, girlfriend Grace walks out, Wilf acquires as a lover a ruthlessly ambitious New York-based editor, loses his job, finally finds himself drawn to Spalding's wife, and living in a Vauxhall squat somehow leading (in a further crazy spiral of plot) to sinister deadly attacks. The 1980s are continually evoked with a litany of lost icons--Wayne Sleep, Mrs T, Ludovic Kennedy, Wogan--and invocations of "the new ruthlessness", "the new amorality". The best and most real moments of Smashing People come when the forced, nasty humour of London's literati is left far behind, and we explore Wilf's roots. Michael Fishwick's plan, it seems, is to relate all this 80s decadence in his characters' shared youth in Shropshire and Oxford. It seems true of his tale that, no matter what road these people take, they all lead back to Shrewsbury. There Fishwick finds a tenderness and depth that his smashing people could never provide. --Alan StewartRead More