Waking Up in Toytown
John Burnside
Waking Up in Toytown
In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, a man runs away to the suburbs, to live what he hopes will be a normal life. With the aid of his last remaining friends he finds a regular job, goes to AA meetings and resolves to 'disappear into the banal' - to escape his addictive personality and find a 'Surbiton of the mind'- but he can't seem to outrun his own demons and, before long, he is back where he started. The suburbs, though, are not quite as normal as he had imagined and, as he relapses into chaos, he encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms - as he drifts further and further into unreality. The sequel to his haunting account of a troubled childhood, "A Lie About My Father", John Burnside's memoir follows his hopeless quest for peace and mental security as the ghosts and terrors close in and the illusion of Surbiton falls apart.
4.7 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
272 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0224080736 |
| Publisher |
Jonathan Cape |
| |
In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, a man runs away to the suburbs, to live what he hopes will be a normal life. With the aid of his last remaining friends he finds a regular job, goes to AA meetings and resolves to 'disappear into the banal' - to escape his addictive personality and find a 'Surbiton of the mind'- but he can't seem to outrun his own demons and, before long, he is back where he started. The suburbs, though, are not quite as normal as he had imagined and, as he relapses into chaos, he encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms - as he drifts further and further into unreality. The sequel to his haunting account of a troubled childhood, "A Lie About My Father", John Burnside's memoir follows his hopeless quest for peace and mental security as the ghosts and terrors close in and the illusion of Surbiton falls apart.
Reviews
The Independent
Fiona Sampson
"Burnside is a genuinely transformative writer, in whose hands what could be unpromisingly formless acquires real light and shade. In place of the "and then... and then" of misery memoir, he has produced an acute, beautifully written, study of the self in process."
22/01/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Doug Johnstone
"Burnside is acutely aware of the self-deception in all of us, addictive personalities or not, and Waking Up in Toytown is as much about the nature of truth and a search for our true selves as it is anything else… Burnside may not find himself convincing, but this complex, considered piece of work certainly is."
10/01/2010
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The Daily Express
Christopher Silvester
"Burnside’s memoir deserves to become a classic. Has anyone written about the direct experience of mental illness with such scrupulous observation and wit? It doesn’t matter that Burnside thinks too much when he’s writing his scintillating prose reflections since that betokens pleasure for the reader, just as long as he doesn’t try driving a car at the same time."
15/01/2010
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The Financial Times
Harry Eyres
"You could call it a case of John Keats meets Trainspotting (Burnside was born in Fife in 1955 and has returned to live there), with a touch of The Office thrown in; Burnside is an utterly original author, whose writing ranges from the extremely refined to the surprisingly coarse."
11/01/2010
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The Guardian
Aida Edemariam
"If there was a fault in the first memoir it was that most of the adult empathy Burnside might have had for his violent, alcoholic father was constrained by a child's hurt and hating point of view; Waking Up in Toytown is a larger, more generous book, in part because concentrating on the vicissitudes of his own mind frees him from having to imagine how someone else ticks."
02/01/2010
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The Spectator
William Leith
"One of the best told memoirs I’ve read for ages."
13/01/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
"“This is a story I am telling myself, though I have no idea why,” Burnside writes. “Nothing happens in this story, or nothing much.” But it is in exploring his apprehension of the patterns that swirl, the currents that lap and ebb beneath the banalities of everyday discourse, that the former lunatic writes himself into a kind of sanity."
02/01/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Adam O'Riordan
"Burnside has an ability to lend a beauty to the mundane and the debased… This is an affecting book from a writer of manifest and manifold talent; a compellingly readable memoir possessed of a genuine spiritual and intellectual depth."
26/01/2010
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The Sunday Times
Bee Wilson
"You can tell that Burnside is a poet (the author of 12 collections). His stunningly exact prose stands as a rebuke to the gonzo school of Hunter S Thompson, which assumed that to capture the quality of being intoxicated, you must write as if you were still drunk or stoned. Burnside, conversely, writes from a position of sobriety and sanity, which makes his story more illuminating as well as more moving."
10/01/2010
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