Chris reviewed 8 faces 5 by Elliot Jay Stocks
None
5 stars
Let’s all meet up in the Year 2000 …
A portrait of growing up in the 1980s in a world of inappropriate colours, lurid drinks and electronic music. Three girls who met at school and share almost the same birthday promise to meet up when they’re 25 (i.e. in 1992), and on Millennium Eve, and when they’re 50. A picture of those decades with all the over-consumerism and socio-economic dread that it entailed.
The present-day story is of them turning fifty ... in 2017 which avoids inconvenient questions about the current Covid-and-Brexit situation. All three get into the music scene and music journalism – at which Maya proves particularly adept and makes a career of it, while dowdy Sandra who seems set for the marriage – kids – suburbia route drifts into retail. Jane comments on both of them and doesn’t seem to have much time for either of them, …
Let’s all meet up in the Year 2000 …
A portrait of growing up in the 1980s in a world of inappropriate colours, lurid drinks and electronic music. Three girls who met at school and share almost the same birthday promise to meet up when they’re 25 (i.e. in 1992), and on Millennium Eve, and when they’re 50. A picture of those decades with all the over-consumerism and socio-economic dread that it entailed.
The present-day story is of them turning fifty ... in 2017 which avoids inconvenient questions about the current Covid-and-Brexit situation. All three get into the music scene and music journalism – at which Maya proves particularly adept and makes a career of it, while dowdy Sandra who seems set for the marriage – kids – suburbia route drifts into retail. Jane comments on both of them and doesn’t seem to have much time for either of them, her East Birmingham background distancing her from the Moseley shoals of Sandra and Maya, although those two clearly accept her, which she is too much of a snob and a fault-finder to appreciate.
And of course it isn't all good. Jane is an unreliable narrator not least because she takes a long time to realise she’s the one at fault. Jane alone wonders why at least one of her friends has distanced herself while, even without the specific things she did when she was young, the reader is quite aware.
It’s refreshing to see the talented d’Souza back on the scene – her novels developed a genuine talent and one rooted very often in her native Birmingham (which of course gets a sneer from Jane there – but an underrated city it is. If all you can see is surface, you’ll see nothing). Much of her fiction evokes a particular moment that will be nostalgic before you know it.