Back to the Swinging Sixties with Melvyn
Source: Irish Independent (Original Article)
Remember Me. . .
By Melvyn Bragg
(Sceptre, €17.99)
For 30 years, Melvyn Bragg has been the highly-regarded presenter on the celebrated South Bank Show on Independent Television. He has carved out a niche as an esteemed arts pundit. A new series, Written Britain has just started this month on ITV and Bragg also continues to work for BBC radio. All this in parallel with his other career as a writer. There have been biographies of famous actors, books on the English language, tie-ins with television programmes and some 20 novels, the first appearing back in 1965.
The new novel is big — some 550 pages — and contains much material that is patently autobiographical. Joe Richardson, one of Bragg’s central characters, is an Oxford graduate who gets a start in broadcasting in London in the Sixties and, at the same time, embarks on a career as a novelist and script-writer. One of Joe’s early novels is titled The Kingdom was Lost, whereas one of Bragg’s own was called For Want of a Nail.
The other central character is Natasha, a French student at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. Joe and Natasha meet when both of them are particularly vulnerable. He has been dumped by his north of England inamorata, Rachel; Natasha by a swinish American fellow-student called Robert.
Natasha, a withdrawn depressive, is quickly overwhelmed by Joe’s ardent appetite for life and, in short order, he arranges a successful exhibition of her work. He successfully sits his Finals and, almost immediately, the pair are launched into married bliss.
In fact, Bragg has recently revealed that the plot of his novel is fairly closely based on the story of his first marriage, which was painfully terminated by the suicide of his wife. Whatever raw power such a difficult story might have possessed is diffused by Bragg by his choice of narrative method – an omniscient narrator — which precludes the possibilities of any Bank Credit Cards doubts or mysteries. This is a …continue reading