Mr Golightly's Holiday (Audiobook)

Synopsis: Fiction readers with a sweet tooth and a high tolerance of Anglican whimsy are offered much beguilement in Sally Vickers' new novel Mr Golightly's Holiday. Set in the Devon village of Great Calne, it records the events observed, and in part precipitated, by Mr Golightly, the author of a work once famous but now tending to be overlooked, who has elected to settle himself in this community for a while. Mr Golightly himself, a rumpled, elderly figure arriving in a half-timbered Traveller van, is a familiar enough version of "the male author"; Great Calne, an apparently idyllic village with a wide range of carefully differentiated characters, but underneath seething with unseen discontents and rivalries, is itself another easily summoned trope--the kind of community now perhaps most commonly encountered in fictional terms in TV shows. This is handy, for Mr Golightly decides that the best way of dragging his great work into the limelight of popularity and relevance is to recast it as a soap opera. In the event, he makes little headway with this project because, of course, the affairs of the village become all-absorbing and gradually draw him in. And so things unfold, as the characters carefully established by Sally Vickers work out their destinies in a mixture of social comedy (some of it very sharp), melodrama, nature mysticism and visionary redemption that delivers far more than the opening paragraphs can suggest. Moreover, the precise identity of Mr Golightly, while not exactly part of the plot, is disclosed gradually and may come as a surprise to some.

Review: Deliciously addictive. To begin with I thought it was just an ordinary tale about village life, the writing is so subtle that at first I entirely missed the subtext. Mr Golightly, a polite, affable and fairly ordinary middle aged man, is renting a cottage in Devon whilst trying to write a sequel to his bestselling book of many years ago. He has decided, as befits modern times, that he will attempt to write a soap opera using the same cast of characters, the only trouble being that he has hardly ever watched a soap opera. At the same time he is trying to get to grips with his new laptop and learn the incredibly complicated and convoluted art of sending and receiving e.mails.

The village of Great Calne is teeming with people who all seem to need Mr Golightly's help and assistance, they have a way of swallowing up his time (although he seems more than happy to oblige them) and he finds it hard to focus on his writing and seems to get no further forward with it. The villagers are a bit of a bunch of scheming, dishonest, immoral, self servers and at one point in his life Mr Golightly would have taken a pretty dim view of them, he is inclined to be more benevolent now though, age and experience has made him more charitable. He has at some point in his life known tragedy, his son died and it's something which is still very painful to him. He finds it hard to accept and understand it.

The writing is just sublime, it's very witty and gentle but also at times whimsical, dark and revelatory. I had listened to about three quarters of the book before I realised that Mr Golightly was really someone else altogether. When I finished listening I started listening all over again and felt embarrassed that I hadn't noticed the clues to his identity which had been there all along, but it is so subtly done and the author kind of drip feeds the info in at a time when you think you've got his character sussed out.

I loved it and thought that Michael Maloney did a fantastic job with the narration.