The Party

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Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking, into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.” Pero un hecho que traerá consecuencias años después les pasará factura y pondrá a ambos en el lugar que ocupan, hay un tercer personaje, Lucy, la mujer de Martin que tiene un papel importante en la narración. Elizabeth grew up in Northern Ireland and her first job was for The Derry Journal. Since then, she has worked for The Evening Standard, The Sunday Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday and the Observer where she was staff feature writer for eight years. She won a British Press Award in 2004 for Young Journalist of the Year and was Highly Commended as Feature Writer of the Year in 2013. She is the co-founder of Pin Drop, a live performance short story studio, and a regular contributor to Sky News and BBC Radio 4.

I won't deny that Martin is a bit of a despicable character but I also felt sorry for him in some respects. He truly believes that Ben is the most magnificent person he's ever met and to find out that it's only been a friendship of convenience has to be a terrible realization. It's quite obvious to anyone that Martin is gay and in love with Ben. Martin is forever being ridiculed by his peers for being Ben's "Little Shadow" and he's well aware of all the inside jokes being made at his expense. Because of this he never really comes out and actually ends up marrying Lucy. It's sad to think that anyone would be made to feel this way just because of who they are and yet it happens all the time. There were more than a few times that I wanted to stop reading this book, relegate it to my DNF list, and move on, but I often feel a need to finish books that I've received thanks to NetGalley and each book's publisher. Yet, it is clear Martin values his friendship with Ben a great deal, with a pathetic sort of hero worship or neediness, that he doesn’t seem to have nor require from his wife. The admirable energy (and anger) of the writing too often curdles into sneering and this, in turn, creates a constrictive claustrophobia that stops the book reaching for something more resonant – about unrequited gay male love, perhaps, or undead marriages, or even human monstrosity. I sometimes had the sense of the prose asphyxiating itself. Sure, people are awful, but “nothing is simply one thing”, as Virginia Woolf has it, not even the bad guys. And if so, why dramatise them? Martin Gilmour and Ben Fitzmaurice have been best friends for 25 years, since their days together at Burtonbury School.

People you considered the closest, most loyal, most intimate allies, will drift away from you and quite often, you won’t know why.” Martin Gilmour is an outsider. When he wins a scholarship to Burtonbury School, he doesn’t wear the right clothes or speak with the right kind of accent. But then he meets the dazzling, popular and wealthy Ben Fitzmaurice, and gains admission to an exclusive world. Soon Martin is enjoying tennis parties and Easter egg hunts at the Fitzmaurice family’s estate, as Ben becomes the brother he never had. The Fitzmaurice family is painted like many well-worn old money types, giving them an air of power and entitlement that appears unshakeable. Upon my first reflections, I thought the author may have gone a little overboard with her depictions of grand wealth, depending too heavily on stereotypes, coming dangerously close to turning the family into caricatures. But, on second thought, they may have been predictable cardboard figures most of the time, but, they played their roles chillingly well. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Day’s latest is a dark, haunting, and elegantly crafted tale of obsession, desperation, devastation, and rebirth.I just got one of my dream guests, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and she was incredible. Still on my list are Marcus Rashford, Dr Dre, Michael Jordan or either of the Obamas.