The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit by Graham Joyce
My rating: 3/5 cats
3.5 stars cats
this is the 8th graham joyce novel i have read, and it’s in the dead center of my “enjoyment of graham joyce” spectrum. it’s not nearly as good as The Silent Land or Some Kind Of Fairy Tale, but it is much better than The Tooth Fairy. it’s a historical coming-of-age novel that’s not taking any big ambitious chances, the way my favorite of his books do, but it’s quietly haunting with a perfect descriptive atmosphere that managed to make me nostalgic for a time and place i never personally experienced.
this book is pretty much as straightforward as graham joyce gets. yes, there are supernatural elements, but they are mild, and can be written off with non-magical explanations, and they contribute to the tone without transforming the narrative into a full-on ghost story.
this takes place in a coastal resort town during england’s historic heat wave of 1976 which also saw a huge infestation of ladybugs. which is what i am going to call them, since “ladybird” doesn’t feel right in my american head. in england, a heat wave means the temperature was in the 80’s (F), with a record high of 96F.
and ladybug infestations look like this:
david is using his summer away from university to work as a greencoat, helping to entertain the vacationers at one of the holiday resorts in skegness, the same village where his biological father died when david was three years old. during this summer, he will experience great highs and lows, loves and lusts, disillusionment, obsession, fear, ghosts, drugs, companionship, family secrets, and the national front, as he tries to find his place in the world and figure out what role he has in the lives of others.
It was one of the features of being a Greencoat. The holidaymakers always wanted you to be photographed with them. I might as well have been dressed up in a cuddly bear suit for all they knew of me. Would my smiling face define the holiday for them? Would I help to fill in a hole in their memories? Even people whom I’d never spoken with pulled me into their snapshots. I often wondered what they would think when they reviewed these photographs, maybe years later. Would they only see the bright smile? Or would they recognize a troubled young man behind it all. But the photograph was a detail in a holiday story, where I was a theater prop, a bit of scaffolding on the stage. I crossed from my story briefly into theirs and back again.
it’s a subtle story, without fireworks or jaw-dropping twists, but it’s lulling, well-written, and recognizable—a bit of the human experience in a slim summer tale. it’s worth a read, stretched out with a glass of something full of clinking ice cubes, with frequent glances up between chapters to stare off into the past.
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