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Winner of the 2003 World Fantasy Award Graham Joyce chronicles a haunting, war-torn terrain in this heartrending novel of one family's quest to begin again -- without forgetting the lives they left behind.
The Facts of Life
Set in Coventry, England, during and immediately after World War II, The Facts of Life revolves around the early years of Frank Arthur Vine, the illegitimate son of young, free-spirited Cassie and an American GI. Because Cassie is too unreliable and unstable to act as his proper guardian -- and is prone to "blue" periods in which she wanders off without warning or recollection -- Frank is brought up in the care of his strong-willed, stout-drinking grandmother, Martha Vine, who has, among other homemaking talents, the untoward ability to communicate with the dead.
So begins the first decade of Frank's life, one in which ghosts have a place at the table and divine order dictates the outcome of his days. Along the way there are brief stays with each of his six eccentric aunts, visits to the local mortuary, and voices inside of his own head that suggest that he, too, has the gift of supernatural intuition. An affecting tale of family and history, war and peace, love and madness, The Facts of Life will leave readers spellbound with its resounding expression of magic realism.
- Sales Rank: #2043810 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Washington Square Press
- Published on: 2004-06-01
- Released on: 2004-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .87" w x 5.31" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 294 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Warm with nostalgia and flecked with the subtle fantasy that seasons nearly all his fiction, Joyce's latest novel (after Smoking Poppy) is an uneven mix of the charming and the self-consciously peculiar. The setting is Coventry, England, in the years after WWII, where the surviving Vine family-mother Martha, her seven grown daughters and their various offspring-are all trying to build lives out of the ruins left by Nazi bombs. The bittersweet events center on young Frank, the illegitimate son of psychologically unstable youngest daughter Cassie, who like his mum has inherited a fey streak that makes him receptive to precognition and restless spirits. As Frank and Cassie bounce from household to household, cared for by different family members, their peregrinations evoke in miniature the British postwar experience, mirrored in the lives of Cassie's siblings: one is married to a man who relives the war through his affair with a dead soldier's wife; another is a politically liberal participant in a comically self-destructing socialist commune. Virtually plotless, the book unfolds as a series of vignettes, interrelated loosely through shared, affectionately realized characters and seriocomic treatments of death and (especially) sexuality. Frank's supernatural experiences, which include frequent sessions with a mysterious figure he refers to cryptically as "The-Man-Behind-The-Glass," are hints that he shares hi relatives' powers. Indeed, the subtlety with which Joyce presents clairvoyant episodes makes them entirely credible in a novel that celebrates the strong bond of family and the deep well of sensitivity on which they all draw. In the end, this is a haunting story about flawed but good-hearted people who bear the hallmarks of eccentricity but also the beneficent aura of human connectedness.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In this moving novel, Joyce traces the boyhood of Frank Vine, born into a loving and ramshackle family in the English countryside during World War II. The product of a brief liaison between an American GI and a local woman, Frank is marked with an extrasensory gift that he shares with his matriarchal grandmother and his emotionally unstable mother. Shortly after his birth, Frank's mother is deemed unfit to care for him, so his grandmother makes the executive decision that his care will be divided among his six aunts, each highly unconventional in her own right. During the next 10 years, Frank makes his home at a farm, a commune, and a makeshift mortuary, slowly finding his place in his eccentric but loving family. Joyce's emotional tale skirts sentimentality by presenting the family warts and all: each of the sisters is a complex and contradictory figure, and Joyce fully examines the consequences of the small feuds and squabbles that characterize a close-knit family. A beautifully written tale that entwines domestic drama with magic realism. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Isabel Allende [The Facts of Life] is the kind of book I love to read! It's an epic saga about family, love, war, and magic. Joyce's characters are memorable. They remind me of some of my own weird relatives. I have not been so charmed by a novel in a long time.
Alev Lytle Croutier author of Seven Houses and The Palace of Tears Reading The Facts of Life is like stepping into a fictional dream that has resonances, in turn, of Dickens, John Irving, Ian McEwan, Robertson Davies, and Paul Auster. What begins with a quiet pace suddenly sweeps one up in an eddy of quirks. The picaresque family novel brings an unexpected revelation at every corner, and what seems morbid and profane is transformed into beautiful and nearly divine What a delicious discovery!
Jonathan Lethem author of Motherless Brooklyn I won't bother saying Graham Joyce deserves to find a wide audience in America; rather I think the American audience deserves to find him.
The Guardian (UK) Graham Joyce creates families to break your heart...
Time Out, London Joyce is brilliant....[The Facts of Life] is a book about beginnings that are also continuities, and about ordinary lives stranger than casual inspection knows.
Booklist Joyce explores the shape and the texture of truth, walks the thin line between the religious and the sexual, and makes readers marvel at the power of the spirit and the psyche...as a haunting expression of magic realism, [he] evokes the work of Gabriel García Márquez.
Salon.com Joyce walks with the grace of a circus star, or a Henry James, on that narrow line between seeming and being.
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Graceful Characters and Precise Language. A Treasure!
By A Customer
A psychic matriarch, seven daughters and one magical boy hold center stage in Graham Joyce's latest novel, The Facts of Life, a work situated comfortably somewhere between the best mainstream fiction and the subtlest works of fantasy. Be it magical realism or literary horror, the key ingredients here, as with all of Joyce's works, are characters you can reach out and touch. And they touch you right back.
Set in during and post-WWII Coventry, England, the novel opens with "wayward ... fey" Cassie Vine and the bundle in her arms, Frank, whom she fails to give away to a prospective foster mother. Returning home to her mother, Martha and her six sisters, Cassie triggers a discussion that will set the tone and struggle for the rest of the novel. As Cassie herself "is the last girl on Earth fit to raise a child," Martha and her daughters agree that Frank should be raised by the entire clan.
Passed from Martha and Aunt Beatie Vine's own care to Aunt Una and Uncle Tom's farm, to his twin aunts Evelyn and Ina, it becomes clear that Frank is special and possessed of special abilities. Here at the farm, young Frank discovers the Man-Behind-The-Glass, a mysterious figure trapped in the Earth, constantly demanding that Frank bring him things.
Meanwhile, the secret of Frank's conception remains with Cassie, buried deep in the night that German bombers circled over Coventry dropping incendiary and explosive payloads until most of the city was leveled. Cassie, who is regularly possessed of "blue" periods during which she tends to wander far, must often leave Frank in the care of his more stable relatives, transferring him from household-to-household, including an experimental commune and a house with an active mortuary parlor in the back. From each he takes away a lesson about life.
Through it all, Martha watches, patiently directing Franks care from place-to-place, occasionally visited at the front door by precognitive apparitions that help her pave the way.
Though a quiet work, The Facts of Life is no less gripping than Joyce's more conventional work in novels like Requiem and The Tooth Fairy. It's gently graceful characters and precise language makes this alternately horrific and humorous work a treasure whose pages will have slipped through the reader's fingers far too quickly.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Star Rating...INFINITE!
By Barbara A. McCarthy
I picked up this pick not familar with the author Graham Joyce. It took me about 30 seconds into reading the inside flap that this book was going to be special. I can't speak for anyone else, but many a time when I am in a bookstore, I get an odd feeling that there is a book somewhere on those endless shelves that is calling out to me. Doesn't happen all the time, but when it does I try to hone in on the feeling...I had "this feeling" when I found "The Facts of Life".
The plot centers on the Vine family living in Coventry, England during World War II thru the mid fifties. Ah, they are an odd bunch! Martha the matriarch has seven (living) children all girls, now adults. All are married to a just as odd lot of husbands. All except her youngest daughter Cassie who is as the author puts it a bit "fey". Cassie suffers from "blue stetches" wanderings and apts to get herself in trouble. The trouble now,is Cassies unplanned pregnancy (her 2nd) to a baby boy. The first baby, a girl was put up for adoption; Cassie can not bear to have this happen again. So Martha decides since Cassie is too unstable to raise baby Frank alone, the sisters will tke turns raising him.
Up till now this seems like a not so unusual plot for a novel. Except Martha, Cassie, and possibly little Frank have all been bestowed (cursed) with the gift of precognition.
I will not give anymore of the plot away, but this is one hell of a beautiul novel. The story is told with an omniscient view point, so each character is finely drawn, and you really get a wonderful sense of their thoughts and lives.
Coventry if you recall was the town where Lady Godiva made her infamous ride, and that becomes part of the plot as well. Again, trying not to give anything away, there is a chapter that describes The Coventry Blitz, one of the worst bombings in World War II that will make you think that you are there.
For me the sense of "being there" was one of the great pleasures of this book. I felt as if I could taste the Dundee Cake, feel the warmth of the milky tea, and smell the ashen coal in the fireplace. But above all I felt the absolute love in a not so perfect family. Thank You Graham Joyce...you have gained a new fan.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
deep look at tired people recovering from World War II
By A Customer
Everyone who lived through the War still feels its effects though Hitler and the Nazi machine have been dead for a few years. In Coventry, Mrs. Martha Vine is the hub of eight spoke-families consisting of seven daughters, several grandchildren, and a reticent spouse. Martha is a brilliant tactician running her field officers (her daughters) better than any Five Star general could lead. She also has a gift of being able to foretell what will happen. Of her seven children, Cassie inherited the forecasting skill and so has her daughter's illegitimate Anglo-American son Frank too.
Though her siblings think Cassie is mentally unhinged and at times have her committed, they also rotate who takes her and especially Frank, based on General Martha's orders that no one disobeys. Thus, the wandering Frank grows up in a vast assortment of households that range the gamut of the 1950s so that he learns a great deal about the world around him through his not so stable aunts as the people of the Coventry area try differing means to recover and heal from the intensity of Hitler.
This is a deep look at the varying ways that the battered and tired people of Coventry recover from World War II. Through Frank's wanderings between his relatives, the audience obtains an incredible picture of the heart and soul of a bone weary England struggling to recuperate on individual levels. Though more a series of interrelated shorts as seen through Frank's observations than a novel, the theme of Graham Joyce's deep tale is that THE FACTS OF LIFE are humanity can face its darkest moment and its aftermath yet confidently start over.
Harriet Klausner
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