Book description
Lorna, thirty-nine, is married to misanthropic Ralph, who in turn is
wedded to his twenty-seven pipes and his artificial-grass business. In
fact, it’s a ménage à trios, the third party being Lorna’s Monster, a
gleefully sadistic personification of her panic attacks.
The Monster has a field day when, after a botched foot operation, Lorna
is sent to convalesce among the deaf and demented inmates of a nursing
home from hell, where to staff have more problems than the patients.
But, despite her surroundings, she begins to blossom, making new
friends, discovering untapped talents and even a reawakened interest in
sex, thanks to the attentions of an ardent young care-worker. She even
gets offered a challenging new job. Meanwhile Ralph is being sued by a
vindictive business client and fears he will lose his house and his
livelihood.
In another of her wickedly black comedies Wendy Perriam chronicles an
unconventional marriage, showing the bond that can develop between two
people who have experienced a ‘lost childhood’. She also takes a swipe
at the medical profession and, by graphically illustrating the plight of
residents in low-grade care homes, offers a devastating critique of the
way society treats the old and infirm. Yet, throughout, the novel is
leavened by the author’s exuberant wit.
‘One of the finest and funniest writers to emerge in England since
Kingsley Amis. She is gifted with devastating powers of observation . .
.’ Herald Tribune
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
