Book review: Love Notes for Freddie
Eva Rice
Heron Books, €28.50; €19.99
The light tone is set by the epigraph from Oscar Wilde: ‘What a charming boy! I like his hair so much!’
The charming boy in this case is Freddie Friday. He is an apprentice electrician in the Shredded Wheat factory, the town’s biggest employer.
Marnie FitzPatrick and her friend Rachel first encounter him on a bus when they are playing truant from St Libby’s, a kind of Eton for the daughters of the wealthy.
He is wearing blue overalls and carrying a bag full of 45s by the Rolling Stones. Later that day they spot him again, and stop to tell him they like his hair.
The girls are drunk, and Rachel cannot help collapsing in laughter when he corrects her mention of Shredded Wheat biscuits, telling her they are called pillows.
He reveals himself as a formidably talented dancer, a cross between Mick Jagger and Gene Kelly, but desperately in need of a teacher.
The girls’ drunken escapade ends badly when they are expelled from school. Soon after Rachel is involved in a car accident, and loses her right arm, casting a dark, shadow over the story.
The story is told in alternate chapters by two first-person narrators, 16-year-old Marnie Fitzpatrick, and her housemistress and maths teacher, Miss Crewe, also known as Julie, a 41-year-old Canadian.
Julie was once an aspiring dancer in New York, attending auditions and dancing barefoot in Central Park with a brilliant young choreographer she met by chance.
He quotes Neitzsche to her, recognising that she shares a true love of dance: ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.’
But an accident also transformed her life, when she slipped on some steps and broke both ankles, ending a career that had hardly begun.
Marnie is her star pupil, a brilliant mathematician, destined for greatness, but after her expulsion she is sent to West Park, the local comprehensive, where she struggles to progress.
Her stepfather, Howard Tempest, an actor famed for his good looks, does not approve of her studies, believing that maths is a man’s subject, and she should be reading the Romantic Poets.
Her twin brother Caspar is gay, and her mother, whose first husband was a society hairdresser, is miserable believing that Howard is having another affair… The family’s annual summer garden party where ‘Everyone was drunk — or high, or famous or all three,’ is a wonderful set piece, with some cunning name dropping thrown in — Bryan Ferry, for example is given a lift home by John Mills.
But alongside the social comedy is some sharp observation of the last throes of the British class system, as its certainties were eroded by the rise of youth culture.
The death of Brian Jones is an event that unites both posh and working class kids.
Marnie’s drinking habit is recognized as a serious threat to her future, while Howard Tempest is revealed as a far more likeable character than he had initially seemed.
The kind-hearted Miss Crewe, who has of course become Freddie’s dance teacher, is given a happy ending, as is Marnie, once she comes to terms with the fact that Freddie is gay.
It seems there is a ready audience for novels set in the relatively recent past, with the characters’ quaint attitudes and period detail of clothes and music forming a large part of the attraction — nostalgia-lit?
This fine example of the genre offers intelligent, undemanding entertainment, which is sometimes all you need on a hot summer’s day.
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