Guy Ware's new novel charts a course from the 1930s onwards through the fragmentary memories of the 85 year-old Charlie, whose identical twin brother JJ has recently died. Sons of a working-class Communist family, growing up in the radical Peckham Experiment and orphaned by the Blitz, the twins emerge from the war keen to build the New Jerusalem.
In 1968, JJ's ideals are rocked by the fatal collapse of a tower block his council and Charlie's development company have built. When the entire estate is demolished in 1986 JJ retires, apparently defeated. Now he is dead and Charlie, preparing for the funeral, relives their history, their family and their politics. It's a story of how we got to where we are today told in a voice - opinionated, witty, garrulous, indignant, guilty, deluded and, as the night wears on, increasingly drunken - that sucks us in to both the idealism and the corruption it depicts, leaving us wondering just where we stand.
Guy Ware is a critically acclaimed novelist and short story writer. His stories have been listed for numerous awards, including the London Short Story Prize, which he won in 2018. The Guardian described The Fat of Fed Beasts as Brilliant ... the best debut novel I have read in years. His latest novel, The Peckham Experiment, will be published in November.
Title: The Peckham Experiment (Salt Modern Fiction)
Author: Ware, Guy
ISBN: 9781784632632
Binding:
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Publication Date: 2022-11-15
Number of Pages: 208
Weight: 0.1931 kg
Charlie Jellicoe, 85, erudite, gay, leftist, former property developer, sits in his flat in Peckham's famous modernist Pioneer Centre, penning a eulogy on the eve of his twin's funeral. Throughout one drunken night, he rehashes a lifetime of love and war, of corruption and compromise, idealism and betrayal, with magnificent acid wit, because old age should burn and rage at close of day.
-- Rose Shepherd * Saga Magazine *
A new novel featuring Peckham's famous Pioneer Health Centre - the striking modernist building on St Mary's Road that was created to promote the wellbeing of the working-class familites and is now flat - will be published next month ... The action unfolds through the fragmentary memories of a now 85-year-old Charlie, whose twin brother JJ has recently died. As he prepared for the funeral, he relives their history, family and politics.
* The Peckham Peculiar *
For all its topical resonance - amid a national housing crisis and the long aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire - the novel's fatalistic register and taut, controlled narrative voice, by turns doleful and sardonic, set it apart from the preachier political allegories that are currently in such oversupply. Ware's narrator has kept the faith, but he is under no illusions: the universe is not moral and history has no arc. Its trajectory is an irregular spiral, turning constantly in upon itself ... If there is an end, a destination beyond mere annihilation, it is lost to sight.
-- Houman Barekat * The Telegraph *
London itself is a central character here, as seen through the eyes of now 80-something queer quantity surveyor Charlie. We join him on the night of his twin brother's funeral and as he tries to write a eulogy (while getting increasingly sloshed), Charlie recalls the city's journey from the idealism of the actual 1930s Peckham Experiment - which encouraged working-class families to actively participate in their own well-being - to institutional corruption; the power cuts of the three-day week, the rise of Enoch Powell and, above all, the devastating collapse of the tower block that his brother built ... there are shades of the great Gordon Burn in Ware's portrait of period, place and class.
-- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail *
