Word: blaydon
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...heroes of modern fiction have been as unlucky in love as John Blaydon. In two previously published books (Through Streets Broad and Narrow, In the Time of Greenbloom) chronicling various periods of John's life, he has consistently lost the girls he loves. In this third volume of the Blaydon family saga, John is beat out again, and this time by his dashing older brother, David. When Giselle, who is French and flighty, seems ready to return to his arms from her fling with Big Brother, John tells her pettishly: "I hate eating from dirty plates." Giselle responds...
Gabriel Fielding's books about the Blaydons are intended as a major effort "to explore the moral and spiritual values of the confused middle class of our time." This central concern makes young John Blaydon considerably more important than that stock figure of current British fiction, the "sensitive young man." In Blaydon's comic failures in love, his hopeless involvement with family, and his fumbling exploration of religion and politics, Author Fielding finds mirror images of the society John Blaydon so uneasily inhabits...
Mountains of Mourne. Like many a Sassenach before him, Blaydon lands in Ireland expecting an easy conquest. After all, he is tall, dark-eyed, handsome, as capriciously intelligent and nearly as wordy as the Irish themselves. Descending on Dublin in the mid-1950s to study medi cine, Blaydon does battle - on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets - with a suc cession of colleens. Beautiful Theresa has a voice as misty as the mountains of Mourne, and a heart hard enough to splinter Cuchulainn's sword. After another fruitless try, with a girl named Oonagh, Blaydon comes...
...with anarchic fury. Just as baffling is upper-crust Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch, who seems only a silly-ass clubman but whose character proves to have as many layers as an onion; hamhanded Jack Kerruish could not be anything more than an amiable athlete-or could he? Coves & Cobbles. Blaydon's five years in Dublin end in a vast betrayal. Without a word, devious Dymphna drops him and marries someone else; trusted Mike Groarke not only sells Blaydon out but beats him and sneers, "You amused me when you didn't sicken me." Blaydon cannot even deal with...
...novel's end, with his nerve ends jumping like a field of grasshoppers, Blaydon flees home to England, to await the next volume of his saga. In parting from his friend-enemy, Groarke, Blaydon says accusingly: "You are Ireland, the same the English have been running their heads into for the past fifteen hundred years." Groarke answers: "No. I'm not like Ireland, I'm like life...