Page 45 Review by Stephen
Please note: you'll also find this in the ALEC OMNIBUS. Before that was even on the horizon, I wrote...
Autobiographical collection of the three one-shots GRAFFITI KITCHEN, LITTLE ITALY and THE DANCE OF LIFEY DEATH. The last piece used to be my own personal favorite before HOW TO BE AN ARTIST came along, o'er brimming as it is with the delights of his children, encounters with wine, and work on FROM HELL, set in his home in Brisbane , Australia .
Sandwiched in between are the short stories he completed whilst in his wife's home town in tropical northern Australia , when his family's so young you learn about births and mid-wives, and err, potty training. But a fresh reading of the first piece, Eddie's favourite of his entire career, proved far more engrossing than I originally recalled. "The writing is on the wall; there are no recipes for love," went the original Tundra tag line describing the piece, and yes, it's about a couple of affairs Eddie - sorry, Alec - embarked on, messily entwined, whilst living much earlier in Southend, scraping for money, slicing up big sheets of metal and working on the Danny Grey stories. It's full of chance meetings, fateful reunions, and the most candid sexual yearnings, some of them blunt, some of them funny, some of them poignant with poetry. It's a mapping of how we meander in and out of each others' lives and memories ("I have an insight: 'I am the only element of continuity in my own life'") without any such thing as a clean break.
"As we leave the pub I'm warming to the absurdity of it: that huge and noble concept, Love, is reduced in the modern world to 'going out', and Romeo is stuck indoors with his ice-cream melting ."
Since it's Eddie you know it's also going to be full of playful wit:
"Today I'm reading a book that tells me to move on to new adventures. Tomorrow I'm reading another book."
And you know what you're in for from the very first page when listening to a drunken Jimmy Fulton, jacket looped over one arm:
""All's for the best in the best of all worlds. That's from Candide - an' ye know what it means? It means the situation ye're in's the one ye deserve to be in", he says while two kids make off with his coat."
