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06-11-2012, 15:54
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When Pete Brown told me he was writing Shakespeare’s Local and what the book would be about and the themes that would run through it I felt a couple of things. I envied him all the research (we all love research, it stops us from writing), but I also felt excited, knowing that if anyone could do Julie Myerson’s Home (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Home-Story-Everyone-Lived-House/dp/0007148232) on a pub it would be Brown. Over the course of the writing of the book, I heard scraps and fragments of what the writer was doing (and of course I recall the trauma when the laptop was nicked, though he’s not the first to start again, TE Lawrence left the first manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom) on the train), and I read a chapter early in the year and thought it his best work yet. And then in the middle of the GBBF, the author emerged grinning from a blur of beeks with an uncorrected proof copy and I devoured it in a couple of days. Coming back to it during the week it is published has re-confirmed me that it is a brilliant romp.


It’s several centuries in the life of the George in Borough, the last remaining galleried inn in London, a place where Dickens was known to take a jar and perhaps, just perhaps, Shakespeare turned up one day for a cup of sack (though the author admits that there are no records of him visiting the George). You get a sense of the history of the inn and the surrounding area, through centuries of turmoil and change, especially when the railways came, while all manner of characters hop skip and jump through the pages: Chaucer, a poet who devotes his words to poeticising farts, highwaymen, the murdered, the odd ghost, Princess Margaret, hop dealers, the SPBW and Roger Protz. Even though I felt the first chapter started slow it soon hit the tracks and rocked, roistered, chuckled, belly flopped Keith Moon-like into a swimming pool and sent surrealism into a corner with a dunce cap on its head before bringing it back to lead the class. I read it through a flurry of grins and it did the impossible: made me want to visit Grantham (though to be fair I would have to say revisit as I once went to a wedding reception in the galleried inn he mentions in Margaret Thatcher’s home town). It’s a book to be read in front of a roaring fire, in your favourite inn, a glass of barley wine to hand and just letting the story take you over.



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PS if you’ve ever seen The Time Machine starring Rod Taylor have a read of the bit in the prologue where Brown takes the reader through time; I would hazard a guess that there’s a bit in the film that has a big influence on this particular passage.
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