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GOODREADS REVIEWER TO SUE BOOKER PRIZEWINNING AUTHOR

- Associated Press, 23 May 2012


"I am appalled," says Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviewer Paul Bryant, speaking at his pleasant Nottingham home earlier today. "Friends had told me of this but I had brushed it aside as a matter below my concern. But then I stumbled upon an article in the Guardian and after reading that the bottom just fell out of my world. I will have to sue Alan Hollinghurst for damages now."

The article in question, entitled "The Booker can Drive People Mad" by Rachel Cooke, appeared in the 20th May edition. In it, Paul learned of a character in Mr Hollinghurst's latest novel which is clearly based on himself, even to the extent of having his own name. Mr Bryant pointed out the following passages :


The Stranger's Child, a capacious and wonderful book that begins in one suburban garden in 1913 and ends in another in 2008, has many themes. It is about love, and the passing of time; it is, too, about ambition, taste and disappointment. But more than anything, it is about the unknowability of human beings, and the misunderstandings, even the danger, associated with trying to plug the gaps in our perceptions.

Its nastiest and perhaps most memorable character is Paul Bryant, an enterprising hack reviewer and the would-be biographer of Cecil Valance, the Rupert Brooke-ish figure whose short life and long but ever-shifting literary reputation crouches at the heart of The Stranger's Child.

Bryant makes a living poking around in people's lives � and I have the impression that his creator disapproves. When he goes to stay with Daphne Sawle, for whom, when she was a girl, Cecil Valance wrote a famous poem, she likens him to a "little wire-haired ratter"; she knows, even before he has lobbed his first question, that all he is interested in, basically, is "smut".

I place my own tape recorder down on the small table beside us. I half expect it to explode, like a grenade. So, does he loathe Paul?

"Well, I wanted to depict him changing," he says, carefully. "And one knows how sweet young people can turn into monsters and bores." They curdle. "Yes, exactly. They curdle."

He wasn't always going to be a novelist, though. Poetry was his first love. An only child, he grew up in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where his father was a bank manager (he poured this time into The Stranger's Child: Paul Bryant begins his working life in a bank in a small, country town, where he reads Angus Wilson in his lunch hour, and gets turned on by the angle of his stool at the cash desk).

The real Paul Bryant, visibly distressed, beat his kitchen table and said "I wish to make it very plain, I have never been turned on by the angle of my stool... the very idea... is repulsive."

He acknowledges that this will be a David and Goliath contest, and that Mr Hollinghurst will have powerful resources to defend his novel in court. "I have to do this - it is my very character which is at stake here. I do not wish my children's children to believe that I was ever a little wire-haired ratter. And to call me in print a hack reviewer. Well! I just don't understand why he has done this. What have I ever done to Alan Hollinghurst? But he will have to pay now, and dearly."

Mr Hollinghurst was unavailable for comment.