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Estrangement
Christmas at Keswick Avenue is subdued following the death of Robert Healy’s mother. Before the teenager has time to adapt to the new situation domestic life is further disrupted when his father Craig remarries and a new family moves in. The strain is too much for everyone and it is only a matter of time before a crisis leads to a traumatic event. The resulting unresolved conflict lingers through the years, and when Robert returns to England after a long absence, he finds himself a stranger in his own hometown.
Set in the fictional British seaside resort of Broadgate in the 1980s and 2010s, Estrangement is a compelling coming-of-age story that also examines the lifelong consequences of a familial alienation.
Set in the fictional British seaside resort of Broadgate in the 1980s and 2010s, Estrangement is a compelling coming-of-age story that also examines the lifelong consequences of a familial alienation.
269 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 3, 2023
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July 18, 2023
Estrangement, Caoshan Press (April 3, 2023), available on Amazon.com in hardcopy (USD$18.49), audio, and paperback (USD$11.09), is the debut novel by UK author Gary Heath.
I liked this novel and enjoyed reading it. Set in a small English town on the south coast in the 1980s and 2010s, Estrangement tells, in a meandering biographical fashion, the story of Robert Healy’s teenage years and, later, his early thirties. Robert is an astute, clever lad with a mature, discerning eye for politics and economics, about which he espouses articulate left-wing opinions.
However, the narrative’s thematic and dramatic backbone is Robert’s struggles with familial crisis, not least of which is his mother’s recent death and, as a result, an increasingly complicated and challenging relationship with his widowed father. There is a personality clash there, too, amongst the ubiquitous angst and simmering adolescent resentment of an emergent adult for his parent whose expectations he believes he never entirely meets—a good dose of the universal here.
Herein lies the early thread of the novel’s principal theme: the individual's alienation from the once familiar regarding people, places and childhood-acquired acculturation. Heath explores the psychological premise that childhood trauma significantly influences and informs adult behaviour and thinking. It can, indeed, lead to feelings of alienation and detachment in later life, compounded by life decisions, at times destructive in nature, made under its sway.
Part II of the novel links Part I turning on this premise and envisages the alienation one might have as a consequence, in adulthood, for what were once childhood people, places, and feelings, and the domestic traumas accompanying that developmental stage of life for many people, such as grief, peer bullying, the self-esteem fragility of first sexual encounters, and struggles in conformist, authoritarian settings like high school.
That feelings of estrangement can also derive from literal foreign experience is central to the novel and Robert Healy’s experience. As someone who experienced both a degree of familial trauma in childhood and who has spent most of my later life abroad, I identified with many of Robert Healy’s thoughts, feelings, and at times, behaviours that manifested his estrangement.
It is important to note, however, that my reading of Healy’s life perceived his estrangement from the get-go: his sense of alienation is evident in his adolescent personality, his interests and concerns, and not least his perceived differences from many of those around him, both peers and adults and especially and critically, his father. Here, as I have observed previously about the novel, the plights of Heath’s characters speak to the predicaments many of us experience nowadays.
In these various senses of alienation, I found some of the most exciting and authentic aspects of Heath’s novel and his chief protagonist, Robert Healy. In some ways, Healy’s estrangements are not all that remote from Camus’ Arthur Meursault in The Stranger. That feeling of, on the one hand, a dissonant depressing commonality framed, on the other, as we stare out at the world around us through the windows of our souls by a detached desperation to be individual, to be unique and acknowledged so.
Much of Heath’s narrative is relatively homely, however. He treats his readers to excerpts of Robert’s daily life, including social interactions at school with friends and teachers. There is a lunchtime debate on economics and elsewhere, an exciting and well-observed description of an inter-house rugby match with Robert, we are told, cleverly regarding the game as a metaphor for ‘smash and grab capitalism’.
In addition to the theme of the individual’s estrangement in society, the political and historical commentary also inform Robert Healy’s unfolding narrative. These socioeconomic and political interests feature prominently in Robert’s reported interactions with peers and in his recorded thoughts. They often influence his pursuits both as a teenager and in his later life as a reporter, traveller, and volunteer worker.
As intellectual ring cycles, these philosophical excursions lend the novel an eruditeness and underpin my feelings of the work being a biographical account of the character Robert Healy’s life. They reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Passenger. However, unlike that author whose characters discuss and argue at length about all manner of sophisticated science, technology, and philosophical topics in extended dialogues, Heath’s characters’ discourses are primarily reported. More adept telling of a story through dialogue will likely come with future endeavours and the honing of his fictional writing talents.
Then again, Estrangement is not a rip-roaring ‘whodunnit’ or a clever plot gradient-devised adventure story rising to a climactic pinnacle and cathartic denouement. Nor is it a pastiche of myriad interpretative meanings, wrought denotations, or confounding connotations strung out in the narrative form of a post-modern jigsaw puzzle novel, ala Thomas Pinchen.
Heath’s work is immediately familiar from a broad, white middle-class male European cultural perspective. The novel is male-oriented despite the long shadow cast by Robert’s deceased mother. No apologies here. That said, Healy’s ubiquity is also framed by the exotic or perhaps more suitably expressed as the unconventional or uncommon.
Robert Healy’s times, too, are pre-woke, so some of his attitudes and behaviours regarding women, for example, belong to those contextual decades he inhabits, the 1980s and 2010s, as they should. There is nothing inappropriate here and no call necessary for dogmatic revisionism of Heath’s straightforward, informative, and simple while also entertaining language.
There is a sense in which, too, you can feel the authorial and undoubtedly third-person editing in some of the expressions. So this is a carefully written and edited work but with the tell-tale hallmarks, perhaps, of a first novel. Residual evidence of smudges, scratched paper, and the crumbs of eraser rubbings out. Authorial tracks in the sand that one suspects in his future works, Heath will leave less conspicuously for the reader to sense.
That said, at USD$11:09 for the paperback version, Estrangement is both an inexpensive and valuable read for the reasons I have, hopefully, outlined above. I am not a well-published writer and have not written a novel in my 65 years. Gary Heath’s Estrangement offers a marvellous insight into what a first novel experience and achievement might be. Had I authored Estrangement, I would be very proud of it and myself, as one hopes Mr Heath is of this debut novel and himself as its author.
Review by Wayne Stagg
I liked this novel and enjoyed reading it. Set in a small English town on the south coast in the 1980s and 2010s, Estrangement tells, in a meandering biographical fashion, the story of Robert Healy’s teenage years and, later, his early thirties. Robert is an astute, clever lad with a mature, discerning eye for politics and economics, about which he espouses articulate left-wing opinions.
However, the narrative’s thematic and dramatic backbone is Robert’s struggles with familial crisis, not least of which is his mother’s recent death and, as a result, an increasingly complicated and challenging relationship with his widowed father. There is a personality clash there, too, amongst the ubiquitous angst and simmering adolescent resentment of an emergent adult for his parent whose expectations he believes he never entirely meets—a good dose of the universal here.
Herein lies the early thread of the novel’s principal theme: the individual's alienation from the once familiar regarding people, places and childhood-acquired acculturation. Heath explores the psychological premise that childhood trauma significantly influences and informs adult behaviour and thinking. It can, indeed, lead to feelings of alienation and detachment in later life, compounded by life decisions, at times destructive in nature, made under its sway.
Part II of the novel links Part I turning on this premise and envisages the alienation one might have as a consequence, in adulthood, for what were once childhood people, places, and feelings, and the domestic traumas accompanying that developmental stage of life for many people, such as grief, peer bullying, the self-esteem fragility of first sexual encounters, and struggles in conformist, authoritarian settings like high school.
That feelings of estrangement can also derive from literal foreign experience is central to the novel and Robert Healy’s experience. As someone who experienced both a degree of familial trauma in childhood and who has spent most of my later life abroad, I identified with many of Robert Healy’s thoughts, feelings, and at times, behaviours that manifested his estrangement.
It is important to note, however, that my reading of Healy’s life perceived his estrangement from the get-go: his sense of alienation is evident in his adolescent personality, his interests and concerns, and not least his perceived differences from many of those around him, both peers and adults and especially and critically, his father. Here, as I have observed previously about the novel, the plights of Heath’s characters speak to the predicaments many of us experience nowadays.
In these various senses of alienation, I found some of the most exciting and authentic aspects of Heath’s novel and his chief protagonist, Robert Healy. In some ways, Healy’s estrangements are not all that remote from Camus’ Arthur Meursault in The Stranger. That feeling of, on the one hand, a dissonant depressing commonality framed, on the other, as we stare out at the world around us through the windows of our souls by a detached desperation to be individual, to be unique and acknowledged so.
Much of Heath’s narrative is relatively homely, however. He treats his readers to excerpts of Robert’s daily life, including social interactions at school with friends and teachers. There is a lunchtime debate on economics and elsewhere, an exciting and well-observed description of an inter-house rugby match with Robert, we are told, cleverly regarding the game as a metaphor for ‘smash and grab capitalism’.
In addition to the theme of the individual’s estrangement in society, the political and historical commentary also inform Robert Healy’s unfolding narrative. These socioeconomic and political interests feature prominently in Robert’s reported interactions with peers and in his recorded thoughts. They often influence his pursuits both as a teenager and in his later life as a reporter, traveller, and volunteer worker.
As intellectual ring cycles, these philosophical excursions lend the novel an eruditeness and underpin my feelings of the work being a biographical account of the character Robert Healy’s life. They reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Passenger. However, unlike that author whose characters discuss and argue at length about all manner of sophisticated science, technology, and philosophical topics in extended dialogues, Heath’s characters’ discourses are primarily reported. More adept telling of a story through dialogue will likely come with future endeavours and the honing of his fictional writing talents.
Then again, Estrangement is not a rip-roaring ‘whodunnit’ or a clever plot gradient-devised adventure story rising to a climactic pinnacle and cathartic denouement. Nor is it a pastiche of myriad interpretative meanings, wrought denotations, or confounding connotations strung out in the narrative form of a post-modern jigsaw puzzle novel, ala Thomas Pinchen.
Heath’s work is immediately familiar from a broad, white middle-class male European cultural perspective. The novel is male-oriented despite the long shadow cast by Robert’s deceased mother. No apologies here. That said, Healy’s ubiquity is also framed by the exotic or perhaps more suitably expressed as the unconventional or uncommon.
Robert Healy’s times, too, are pre-woke, so some of his attitudes and behaviours regarding women, for example, belong to those contextual decades he inhabits, the 1980s and 2010s, as they should. There is nothing inappropriate here and no call necessary for dogmatic revisionism of Heath’s straightforward, informative, and simple while also entertaining language.
There is a sense in which, too, you can feel the authorial and undoubtedly third-person editing in some of the expressions. So this is a carefully written and edited work but with the tell-tale hallmarks, perhaps, of a first novel. Residual evidence of smudges, scratched paper, and the crumbs of eraser rubbings out. Authorial tracks in the sand that one suspects in his future works, Heath will leave less conspicuously for the reader to sense.
That said, at USD$11:09 for the paperback version, Estrangement is both an inexpensive and valuable read for the reasons I have, hopefully, outlined above. I am not a well-published writer and have not written a novel in my 65 years. Gary Heath’s Estrangement offers a marvellous insight into what a first novel experience and achievement might be. Had I authored Estrangement, I would be very proud of it and myself, as one hopes Mr Heath is of this debut novel and himself as its author.
Review by Wayne Stagg
November 27, 2024
I really enjoyed being in this world (albeit a bleak one) and going on the journey through life with Robert; starting with the death of his mum when he was a teenager to the mid-life crisis while struggling to get sober. But there are laugh-out-loud moments too - as if light on the edge of the shadows.
Heath is an honest writer who doesn’t sugarcoat or overwrite. He gives us space within a scene to breath it and feel it, at times picking out the tiniest detail which gives us the whole picture.
This book is for anyone who has become estranged from a world they once knew so well, and may be especially relatable to anyone who has experienced an awkward relationship with their dad (you're watching through your fingers at times). It segways into that territory of alienation, detachment and loss which many of us have experienced but can’t articulate - and it helps us to feel ok about it, somehow.
There is a lack of pace at times, and a couple of the main characters are not developed enough, and there's perhaps too much chat about political history (hence the four not five stars).
Yet Heath, for me, has written a book of huge significance about human relationships in the late 20th/early 21st century.
Heath is an honest writer who doesn’t sugarcoat or overwrite. He gives us space within a scene to breath it and feel it, at times picking out the tiniest detail which gives us the whole picture.
This book is for anyone who has become estranged from a world they once knew so well, and may be especially relatable to anyone who has experienced an awkward relationship with their dad (you're watching through your fingers at times). It segways into that territory of alienation, detachment and loss which many of us have experienced but can’t articulate - and it helps us to feel ok about it, somehow.
There is a lack of pace at times, and a couple of the main characters are not developed enough, and there's perhaps too much chat about political history (hence the four not five stars).
Yet Heath, for me, has written a book of huge significance about human relationships in the late 20th/early 21st century.
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