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Nick Hornby: About a Boy (1998) |
Extract | Review | Interview | Biopic | Hornby's Holloway |
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Extract: Pages one and two of chapter one of Hornby's About a Boy [The text has 422 words; the text presented for written test will be 295 words.] More sample pages are to be found at amazon.com Annotatiaons: none Assignment: Describe the relationship between Marcus and his mother Fiona. In doing so, focus on family aspects and draw conclusions as to where they might be living. (For background information see: Hornby's Holloway.) Use novel related terms like setting, characters and plot (exposition) and character in your answer.
Follow the hyperlinks for more novel related words:
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`Have you split up now?' `Are you being funny?' People quite often thought Marcus was being funny when he wasn't. He couldn't understand it. Asking his mum whether she'd split up with Roger was a perfectly sensible question, he thought: they'd had a big row, then they'd gone off into the kitchen' to talk quietly, and after a little while they'd come out looking serious, and Roger had come over to him, shaken his hand and wished him luck at his new school, and then he'd gone. `Why would I want to be funny?' `Well, what does it look like to you?' `It looks to me like you've split up. But I just wanted to make sure.' `We've split up.' `So he's gone?' `Yes, Marcus, he's gone.' He didn't think he'd ever get used to this business. He had quite liked Roger, and the three of them had been out a few times; now, apparently, he'd never see him again. He didn't mind, but it was weird if you thought about it. He'd once shared a toilet with Roger, when they were both busting for a pee after a car journey. You'd think that if you'd peed with someone you ought to keep in touch with them somehow. `What about his pizza?' They'd just ordered three pizzas when the argument started, and they hadn't arrived yet. `We'll share it. If we're hungry.' `They're big, though. And didn't he order one with pepperoni on it? Marcus and his mother were vegetarians. Roger wasn't. `We'll throw it away, then,' she said. `Or we could pick the pepperoni off. I don't think they give you much of it anyway. It's mostly cheese and tomato.' `Marcus, I'm not really thinking about the pizzas right now.' `OK. Sorry. Why did you split up?' `Oh . . . this and that. I don't really know how to explain it' Marcus wasn't surprised that she couldn't explain what had happened. He'd heard more or less the whole argument, and he hadn't understood a word of it; there seemed to be a piece missing somewhere. When Marcus and his mum argued, you could hear the important bits: too much, too expensive, too late, too young, bad for your teeth, the other channel, homework, fruit. But when his mum and her boyfriends argued, you could listen for hours and still miss the point, the thing, the fruit and homework part of it. It was like they'd been told to argue and just came out with anything they could think of. |
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Synopsis (amazon.co.uk) Will is 36 and doesn't really want children. But then he comes across 12-year-old Marcus and it's pretty clear that Marcus would like a dad. The trouble is, Marcus is weird - a boy who prefers Joni Mitchell to Nirvana. He also knows something about Will that he can definitely use |
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Editorial Reviews (source: amazon.co.uk)
Will Lightman is a Peter Pan for the 1990s. At 36, the terminally hip North Londoner is unmarried, hyper-concerned with his coolness quotient, and blithely living off his father's novelty-song royalties. Will sees himself as entirely lacking in hidden depths--and he's proud of it! The only trouble is, his friends are succumbing to responsibilities and children, and he's increasingly left out in the cold. How can someone brilliantly equipped for meaningless relationships ensure that he'll continue to meet beautiful Julie Christie-like women and ensure that they'll throw him over before things get too profound? A brief encounter with a single mother sets Will off on his new career, that of "serial nice guy." As far as he's concerned--and remember, concern isn't his strong suit--he's the perfect catch for the young mother on the go. After an interlude of sexual bliss, she'll realize that her child isn't ready for a man in their life and Will can ride off into the Highgate sunset, where more damsels apparently await. The only catch is that the best way to meet these women is at single-parent get-togethers. In one of Nick Hornby's many hilarious (and embarrassing) scenes, Will falls into some serious misrepresentation at SPAT ("Single Parents--Alone Together"), passing himself off as a bereft single dad: "There was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word."
What interferes with Will's career arc, of course, is reality--in the shape of a 12-year-old boy who is in many ways his polar opposite. For Marcus, cool isn't even a possibility, let alone an issue. For starters, he's a victim at his new school. Things at home are pretty awful, too, since his musical therapist mother seems increasingly in need of therapy herself. All Marcus can do is cobble together information with a mixture of incomprehension, innocence, self-blame, and unfettered clear sight. As fans of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity already know, Hornby's insight into laddishness magically combines the serious and the hilarious. About a Boy continues his singular examination of masculine wish-fulfillment and fear. This time, though, the author lets women and children onto the playing field, forcing his feckless hero to leap over an entirely new--and entirely welcome--set of emotional hurdles.
P: Is About a Boy a book about having to grow up too early - not being a real child and never experiencing childlike things?
NH: I think it's about learning to experience childlike things in exactly the same way as everybody else in order to survive. All the things that make Marcus unique and such a weird kid are the very same things that are damaging him. So it's more about learning to be the same as everybody else in a slightly depressing way, I think.
P: Do you feel that About a Boy is darker than High Fidelity with its suicide attempts and broken marriages, and screwed up children and so on?
NH: I was conscious of wanting to be a bit darker when I wrote About a Boy. I think the process generally is to try and get darker and funnier as much as I possibly can, and I think How to be Good is a step on in that way, as well.
P: I suppose all your novels have slightly ambiguous endings don't they, particularly About a Boy?
NH: I think the resolution in About a Boy is not so much ambiguous as double-edged. Clearly Marcus is going to be alright, but in the process of being alright he has completely lost any sense of himself and we lose sense of the child that there was throughout the book. I think that that's quite sad and quite a sacrifice.
P: How do you feel about Hugh Grant playing Will in the forthcoming film of About a Boy?
NH: Good. He's wanted to do the part for a long time, which I think is a good sign, and his post-Bridget Jones incarnation as a baddy will serve him well.
The
makers of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's
Diary release their latest hit About a Boy in cinemas nationwide from
26 April 2002. Based on Nick Hornby's bestseller, the film stars Hugh Grant,
Toni Collette and Rachel Weisz.
Hugh Grant (Bridget Jones's Diary)
Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding)
Rachel Weisz (The Mummy Returns)
Nicholas Hoult as Marcus
Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan and Robert de Niro
Chris and Paul Weitz
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Nick Hornby: Biographical Notes (source: abc.net.au) Nick Hornby is a man that maybe eight or so years ago, was teaching English at his local British school. I’m sure he was a damn good teacher but what he really wanted to do was become a writer. He’d been burrowing away for years writing things but hadn’t had too much luck getting stuff published. So he went back and decided to write about the one thing he knew best... football. He’s a mad, keen Arsenal supporter (an English football club). What he did was write down his reminiscences, his feelings and thoughts about his passion, his mad, and at times illogical, passion for the Arsenal football club. His stories became the book 'Fever Pitch' which became a best seller around the world and has also been made into a very successful movie. Since then, Nick Hornby has gone on to write a couple of other great books, High Fidelity and his most recent one, About a Boy, which takes a different bent on his previous writings. It deals very directly with relationships of a thirty-something man with a child and also with the women in his life. Nick Hornby was in Australia in late 1998 and spoke with Francis Leach about his writing, his mad passion for football and trying to make sense of it all. |
Nick Hornby |
Nick Hornby's
Holloway: How to grow old without growing up
(Telegraph.co.uk,
04/05/2002) 
The native cool has gone a bit cold, says Saul Brookfield, but there's no denying an air of we're-all-right
Why write about Holloway? To be blunt, it is what Nick Hornby knows. He lives in the shadows of Highbury's art deco stands, home of his beloved Arsenal, and works from a small office tucked behind Holloway Road. He considers it to be a fairly ordinary area that provides a useful background to his tales of emotionally illiterate, fairly ordinary young men stumbling towards maturity.
"I set the books around my home because where I live is a lot like where an awful lot of people live, in London, Britain, Western Europe and North America," he admitted in an interview.
What's it like in the books?
Despite Hornby's desire to set his work in an unremarkable urban environment, he is obviously writing about north London. On the face of it, his Holloway differs little from sophisticated Islington down the road. In his latest book, How To Be Good, Kate, the main character, even uses the shorthand "people who live in our particular postal district" to refer to the public-sector professionals and media figures who are her neighbours.
"We have a great belief," she adds, "those of us who live in this income bracket and postal district, in the power of words: we read, we talk, we write . . . " Thus How To Be Good and earlier works such as About a Boy seem to be set in an area that is dominated by the lives and loves of the chattering classes; "the old-fashioned Italian" where you can tuck into "polenta and shaved parmesan"; cinemas that show the new Mike Leigh film and latest arty offering from Eastern Europe; minimalist flats with furniture from Heal's; and stainless steel ice-cream makers "that looked as though [they] had never been used".
Northern stars: Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult in About a Boy
Yet, if this all sounds like Joanna Trollope for people with arts degrees, Hornby also undercuts it with the edgy, street-wise and rather scuzzy side to Holloway. Both the main protagonists in High Fidelity and About a Boy, Rob and Will, refuse to grow old gracefully and spend a large part of their time in pubs "competing against a jukebox, or a grunge band or an alternative comedian".
Interspersing the restaurants on the Holloway Road are still the Lo-Cost supermarkets, the kebab houses and the amusement arcades with their "epileptic lights and sirens and explosions and tramps" familiar to large parts of inner-city London. Even the houses which Hornby's middle-class protagonists can retreat to leave them vaguely disappointed. Kate, a GP, dreams of "moving out of our poky terraced house and into something that gave us room to turn around without knocking a child over in the process".
Has it changed?
High Fidelity and About a Boy are both set in the 1990s, so there are subtle differences beyond the fact that nowadays most of the students milling around the University of North London campus are trying to look like So Solid Crew rappers and not Kurt Cobain. Holloway Road has grown more affluent and diverse but is losing that sense of cool that most of Hornby's characters were clinging to.
Certainly, there is no mention in the books of Fettered Pleasures, the gaudy sex shop with the bright-pink front at number 161 or alternative lifestyle supermarket Flamin' Eight at number 120. While monied slacker Will from About a Boy would appreciate the refurbished pubs offering Thai food or 101 varieties of malt whisky (The Quays, number 471), even he would struggle to pay for the classic retro furniture on offer at places such as A1 Upholstery or Back in Time.
However, in the Victorian streets off Holloway Road, there is surprisingly little sign of recent gentrification, while Hornby's next book might have to take into account that Arsenal are set to move into a 60,000-capacity new stadium just round the corner in two years' time.
Who lives there?
To one side of Holloway Road, in the streets of small terraced houses leading to Drayton Park station and Hornsey Road, the homes are predominantly occupied by hard-working London families, with media types taking up residence in the imposing Beaux Arts building.
The other
side of the road is more mixed; there the large, late-Victorian houses has
encouraged the expenditure of some City money, particularly in the streets
behind St Mary Magdalene's church, with professional couples largely taking
up those that have not been sub-divided into flats.
What's on offer?
While a one-bedroom flat on the fringes of Holloway is likely to set you back £150,000, Foxtons (020 7704 5000) offers a two-bedroom apartment in a newly-constructed building off the Holloway Road for £319,950, and have recently sold and a high-ceilinged, two-bedroom, Victorian flat on Furlong Road which had an asking price of £319,950. Further up the ladder, a three-bedroom, four-storey, Victorian family house with 42ft garden on Moray Road is available at £455,000.
On the market
£279,950 Period features and three bedrooms in newly refurbished maisonette in Clissold Crescent