BOOK OF THE MONTH
Wake Up
by Tim Pears
Bloomsbury (0747559570)
Reviewer: Sarah Halloran — Head Bibliographer, Lindsay and Croft
Tim Pears has gained a reputation as a chronicler of family life. The theme of his award-winning first novel, 'In the Place of Fallen Leaves' was a Devon childhood, while the more recent, 'In a Land of Plenty' spanned three generations and over forty years and spawned a lavish BBC adaptation. In his latest novel, 'Wake Up', Pears is keen to show there is more to him than the family saga as he takes a philosophical look at mortality and one of the big issues of the day — the GM food debate. In doing so he should sweep aside any critics keen to pigeon-hole him as a male Joanna Trollope.
John Sharpe is the hero of Pears's fourth novel. A middle-aged businessman he circumnavigates the orbital of an unspecified Midlands town in his shiny Mercedes sometime in our near future. John's father was a greengrocer and it is from these humble beginnings that he and his brother Greg have developed their multinational potato marketing empire Spudnik. On the surface it appears their future lies with 'crispier crisps' but John has been seduced by the potential of genetic modification. In the past a vaccine such as polio may have been administered on a sugar lump. In the future the food itself could stimulate the immune system. However, trials in the Amazon have left volunteers dead and John's hopes of using the humble potato as an edible vaccine have stalled disastrously. Now he has to tell his brother and so he procrastinates, continuing to circle the ring road and pass his exit whilst rehearsing his arguments.
As John loops around the town, his mind also circles. Initially he dwells on his childhood. The setting of the novel in the future rather than the past is a departure for Pears but the subject matter does not stray too far into the realms of science fiction. Indeed the book starts as any Pears aficionado would expect, with the central character's early family history, his marriage and more recently the birth of his first son. Interspersed with Pears's solid family narrative, in which the character of John Sharpe is especially sympathetically drawn, are the dialogues the protagonist has with his doctor — his ailments are numerous and medically unproven, and the arguments he has with his New Age wife, Lily. The oft repeated refrain of the latter is the 'Wake Up' of the title and the closing gambit of any socio-environmental debate in which he plays the 'technology loving' capitalist and she the 'tree hugging' bohemian.
As he has done so effectively in the past Pears shows us an ordinary middle class family and then proceeds to illustrate how far from normal these people really are. The technique he uses to dispel the happy family myth on this occasion is the hero's own musings as he continues to drive around. Having skillfully gained our faith in this likeable family man, Pears reveals that the narrator has been lying to us and indeed to himself. Indeed John fails to be honest about the most basic of facts — such as whether he has ever had counseling, if he flies economy and even where he met his wife. It is unsettling to empathize with a character so fully and have one's trust broken but then these are unsettling issues and revolutionary times. As John says, "This is progress. What can we do? We can't stop still. You stop still, you go round in circles. You go nowhere".
Before the end of the novel we will become even more disillusioned with our hero as yet more and darker mysteries are unveiled. And Pears has one more disclosure in store for us — not the catastrophe we have feared from the beginning- the anticipated recriminations as John admits the secret trials to his skeptic brother- but perhaps unsurprisingly a secret much closer to home.
'Wake Up' is a darker, more thoughtful novel than its much longer predecessors but there is much to admire, not least the author's refusal to clone his previous work.
