Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
Tom Browning is 36. Bored and frustrated at home, he has reached the point of cynicism as a music teacher in a comprehensive school. Asking a class to respond to the lyrics of some pop music, it is Tom, afraid of growing fat, bald and middle-aged, who discerns a spurious truth in the hope and yearning of the words. He promptly falls in love with the only other person to respond, Claire Bennett, beautiful but seventeen. Their affair progresses through danger, delight and paranoia to an inevitable conclusion. Don't Stand So Close is a poignant but very funny tale of the adolescent feelings which a person of any age can feel. It also satirises with devastating wit and candour the hypocrisies and follies of those who regard themselves as our moral guardians.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Rees certainly knows the doldrums of suburbia and the intellectual ennui of school teaching. His debut novel, detailing the budding affair of a middle-aged music teacher and his student, is coated with an intellectual sheen that incorporates multiple references to English poetry and popular song lyrics. Yet beneath the surface lies little more than a conventional plot without much insight into the situation other than detached amusement. The conversation that fills the lives of teacher Tom Browning and pupil Claire Bennett is stilted and full of too-easy British witticisms and ripostes that might sit prettily in a television sitcom, but don't work on a printed page. (Tom: ``I couldn't say I won't dance with you because my wife is a paranoid schizophrenic who'll rip my head off at the shoulders if I stand on the same carpet tile as another woman now, could I?'' Tom's wife: ``We are not here to discuss floor coverings, Tom! We are discussing the future of our marriage!'') Although Don't Stand So Close has its amusing moments, Rees seems altogether too relaxed about his subject matter for the reader to summon much interest. (June)Book Details
Published
June 8, 1994
Publisher
Seren Books
Pages
258
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781854110978