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Geoffrey Chadwick #1
Sunday's Child
Disposing of a corpse is no easy task--particularly on New Year's Eve, and particularly for upstanding lawyer Geoffry Chadwick. For Chadwick brought home the wrong kind of stranger and, while defending himself, dispatched his visitor too well.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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44 people want to read
About the author
Edward O. Phillips
17 books2 followersEdward Oppenshaw Phillips was a Canadian who lived most of his life in Westmount, Quebec. He earned a law degree from the Université de Montréal in 1956, but decided against legal practice. He subsequently graduated from Harvard University with a Master's Degree in Teaching, and later earned a second Master's Degree in English Literature from Boston University.
His first novel, Sunday's Child, was published in 1981. Best known for his novel series featuring Geoffry Chadwick, corporate lawyer, reluctant hero and wry social commentator, Phillips won the Arthur Ellis Award for his novel Buried on Sunday.
Series:
* Geoffrey Chadwick
His first novel, Sunday's Child, was published in 1981. Best known for his novel series featuring Geoffry Chadwick, corporate lawyer, reluctant hero and wry social commentator, Phillips won the Arthur Ellis Award for his novel Buried on Sunday.
Series:
* Geoffrey Chadwick
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 22, 2007
Sunday's Child appealed to me for the problem of disposing of a body (sort of like the Panama canal in Arsenic and Old Lace) but the book disappointed. The disposal of the body is almost secondary to the rest of the book which seems to be a never ending monologue from the protagonist. If only his thoughts on life and love were more interesting!
For the first few chapters, hearing Geoffrey Chadwick's thoughts on being gay and how different generations of men act differently to being gay. By the time the book starts to include flashbacks to Chadwick's wife and daughter which are supposed to poignant and tragic I just didn't care any more. Chadwick can't complete a simple task without waxing on about some sort of flashback or some sort of theory of sex for a minimum of five pages.
Character development is important to well told story but in a thriller, there has to be some plot too. Sunday's Child is unfortunately off balance with too much emphasis on character at the expense of the plot. Take out all the monologue and the book might count as a novella.
For the first few chapters, hearing Geoffrey Chadwick's thoughts on being gay and how different generations of men act differently to being gay. By the time the book starts to include flashbacks to Chadwick's wife and daughter which are supposed to poignant and tragic I just didn't care any more. Chadwick can't complete a simple task without waxing on about some sort of flashback or some sort of theory of sex for a minimum of five pages.
Character development is important to well told story but in a thriller, there has to be some plot too. Sunday's Child is unfortunately off balance with too much emphasis on character at the expense of the plot. Take out all the monologue and the book might count as a novella.
October 9, 2019
Sunday’s Child (Geoffrey Chadwick Book 1)
By Edward O. Phillips
First published 1981
ReQueered Tales edition, 2019
Four stars
“When one is trying to be haughty one ought not to guffaw.”
This book’s beautifully crafted plot, together with its elegant, literate prose, make a dark comedy that is a work of art in the way too few books are today. It takes us through a tumultuous week in the life of a fifty-year-old upper-middle-class WASP corporate lawyer in Montreal. Still reeling from a recent break-up with his lover of three years, Geoffrey Chadwick almost inadvertently picks up a hustler and takes him home – only to accidentally cause his death during an attempted robbery. Everything else in the book spins off this cataclysm and the choices Geoffrey makes as the enormity of what has happened washes over him.
That said, this was a very difficult book for me to review. By the fifty percent mark on my e-reader, I was sure I couldn’t give it more than three out of five stars. At the end, however, with Edward O. Phillips’s beautifully calculated final line, the rating had risen to four stars—a reluctant four stars, but four nonetheless. In short, this is a very good book that I disliked rather a lot.
Part of my complicated reaction to Sunday’s Child relates to my age—both when the book was first published in 1981 (when I was twenty-five) and now at its reissue (sixty-four). A closely related aspect of my reaction to Sunday’s Child is neatly encapsulated in a line from a 1981 review of the book in the Toronto Sun, as cited by Alexander Inglis in his excellent 2019 introduction, describing the book as “…a wise novel about homosexuals.”
First, it is not a book about homosexuals. It is a book about a bisexual man old enough (as is the author) to be my father. It is a book that straight readers could have taken comfort in because it reaffirmed their prejudices and left them feeling smugly liberal in their sympathy. There are three gay men in the book, but they are all secondary characters. The main characters are not gay, but bisexual. Radical and modern at the time it was published, Geoffrey Chadwick’s character seems sadly dated now, a relic of a time when internalized homophobia was so commonplace as to be unrecognized for what it was (even by twinks like me). The fact that neither Geoffrey nor his lover Chris identify as bisexual (even though Chris is cheating on his unsuspecting wife with Geoffrey, who himself was married and had a child) is a detail that contrasts strongly with today’s focus on the much vaunted spectrum of sexuality that has pushed the Kinsey 6 to the margins of identity politics. I suspect that at twenty-five I wouldn’t have even noticed.
The hardest aspect of this book for me lies in the fact that Geoffrey, his lover Chris, and his old friend Larry, all represent the kind of “gay” men who, in 1981, I had learned to avoid like the plague. I was a child of Stonewall, and I had no patience for the archetypes of the past. Larry, a grossly alcoholic queen of the most stereotypical (but not inaccurate) sort, is embarrassing, and surely was meant to be seen in contrast with the steadfast, polished, and discreet (i.e. closeted) Geoffrey. There is only one gay man in the book for whom I felt real sympathy—Geoffrey’s humorless but beautiful and intelligent nephew Richard. Then there’s Walter, septuagenarian friend of Geoffrey’s alcoholic dowager of a mother. His is a marvelous character, of the sort of sly elderly gay man I knew from among my parents’ friends as a child. Yet he is sexually neutral, a veritable eunuch, and is an object of pity in Geoffrey’s eyes, a failed man. “Maybe one of the reasons I resent Walter—maybe resent is too strong a word. Regret? —is that in him I see traces of myself…”
And there you are. The older man I am now sees parts of himself in Geoffrey Chadwick—and not the best parts. Geoffrey is not just old enough to be my father, he rather reminds me of my father, and that puts a whole Freudian spin on my reaction to Sunday’s Child. Geoffrey represents a part of gay heritage that I really don’t want to claim; that in fact I would like to forget. Ironically, that’s what makes the reissue of this book important: forgetting your own people’s history, however unattractive, is never a good thing.
And yet, it is Geoffrey Chadwick who rescues a stray cat and her kittens from certain death and offers help and reassurance to his gay nephew. Even though he represents so many things that, in my lifetime, have become intolerable to me, he also represents things I was taught to value as I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. Those moments of generosity of spirit and actual heroism in the book remind me of how incredibly fortunate my own life has been. How can I not honor that?
By Edward O. Phillips
First published 1981
ReQueered Tales edition, 2019
Four stars
“When one is trying to be haughty one ought not to guffaw.”
This book’s beautifully crafted plot, together with its elegant, literate prose, make a dark comedy that is a work of art in the way too few books are today. It takes us through a tumultuous week in the life of a fifty-year-old upper-middle-class WASP corporate lawyer in Montreal. Still reeling from a recent break-up with his lover of three years, Geoffrey Chadwick almost inadvertently picks up a hustler and takes him home – only to accidentally cause his death during an attempted robbery. Everything else in the book spins off this cataclysm and the choices Geoffrey makes as the enormity of what has happened washes over him.
That said, this was a very difficult book for me to review. By the fifty percent mark on my e-reader, I was sure I couldn’t give it more than three out of five stars. At the end, however, with Edward O. Phillips’s beautifully calculated final line, the rating had risen to four stars—a reluctant four stars, but four nonetheless. In short, this is a very good book that I disliked rather a lot.
Part of my complicated reaction to Sunday’s Child relates to my age—both when the book was first published in 1981 (when I was twenty-five) and now at its reissue (sixty-four). A closely related aspect of my reaction to Sunday’s Child is neatly encapsulated in a line from a 1981 review of the book in the Toronto Sun, as cited by Alexander Inglis in his excellent 2019 introduction, describing the book as “…a wise novel about homosexuals.”
First, it is not a book about homosexuals. It is a book about a bisexual man old enough (as is the author) to be my father. It is a book that straight readers could have taken comfort in because it reaffirmed their prejudices and left them feeling smugly liberal in their sympathy. There are three gay men in the book, but they are all secondary characters. The main characters are not gay, but bisexual. Radical and modern at the time it was published, Geoffrey Chadwick’s character seems sadly dated now, a relic of a time when internalized homophobia was so commonplace as to be unrecognized for what it was (even by twinks like me). The fact that neither Geoffrey nor his lover Chris identify as bisexual (even though Chris is cheating on his unsuspecting wife with Geoffrey, who himself was married and had a child) is a detail that contrasts strongly with today’s focus on the much vaunted spectrum of sexuality that has pushed the Kinsey 6 to the margins of identity politics. I suspect that at twenty-five I wouldn’t have even noticed.
The hardest aspect of this book for me lies in the fact that Geoffrey, his lover Chris, and his old friend Larry, all represent the kind of “gay” men who, in 1981, I had learned to avoid like the plague. I was a child of Stonewall, and I had no patience for the archetypes of the past. Larry, a grossly alcoholic queen of the most stereotypical (but not inaccurate) sort, is embarrassing, and surely was meant to be seen in contrast with the steadfast, polished, and discreet (i.e. closeted) Geoffrey. There is only one gay man in the book for whom I felt real sympathy—Geoffrey’s humorless but beautiful and intelligent nephew Richard. Then there’s Walter, septuagenarian friend of Geoffrey’s alcoholic dowager of a mother. His is a marvelous character, of the sort of sly elderly gay man I knew from among my parents’ friends as a child. Yet he is sexually neutral, a veritable eunuch, and is an object of pity in Geoffrey’s eyes, a failed man. “Maybe one of the reasons I resent Walter—maybe resent is too strong a word. Regret? —is that in him I see traces of myself…”
And there you are. The older man I am now sees parts of himself in Geoffrey Chadwick—and not the best parts. Geoffrey is not just old enough to be my father, he rather reminds me of my father, and that puts a whole Freudian spin on my reaction to Sunday’s Child. Geoffrey represents a part of gay heritage that I really don’t want to claim; that in fact I would like to forget. Ironically, that’s what makes the reissue of this book important: forgetting your own people’s history, however unattractive, is never a good thing.
And yet, it is Geoffrey Chadwick who rescues a stray cat and her kittens from certain death and offers help and reassurance to his gay nephew. Even though he represents so many things that, in my lifetime, have become intolerable to me, he also represents things I was taught to value as I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. Those moments of generosity of spirit and actual heroism in the book remind me of how incredibly fortunate my own life has been. How can I not honor that?
April 14, 2020
An interesting introduction to Geoffry Chadwick and the trick who will now haunt him. Seeing life through Geoffrey's somewhat jaded eyes is interesting in that the setting for the story is in a time period that I've lived through. If I were a character in the story I'd be closer in age to Geoffrey's nephew Richard. Mr. Phillips comedic style had me laughing in the very first chapter. His description of his sister sounds just like my mother-in-law and sister-in-law and I'm sure my husband would agree that the description of Robert's appetite sounds just like me. I can also well identify with the descriptions of many of the other characters as I've encountered individuals who match in real life. The screaming queen and the closeted married man who can't commit. I'm very much looking forward to the next installment of the series.
June 29, 2020
Not quite sure what I think about this one. It's not romance, not mystery, not memoir, not 'literary fiction.' Mostly, I guess, it's a portrait of a time and a place and a milieu, in this case gay Montreal in the 1970s. In that respect, I quite enjoyed it, being myself a gay male of a certain age who was living there at the time. I also appreciated a style of writing that is not often encountered any more, and chortled at some of the literary allusions, but was never fully drawn in to the story itself. It's a distancing style, which is likely why it has fallen out of favour. And finally, I have to admit I didn't much like any of the characters, including the protagonist. So I'll stick with an 'ok' rating here.
July 28, 2023
The review below has been published on Rainbow Book Reviews.
Ah, Geoffrey Chadwick! He’s one of a kind—in his early fifties, Anglo-Canadian (which is no character trait in itself—or is it?) living in Montréal, long-time widower, decidedly if discreetly gay nonetheless, successful if unenthusiastic lawyer, dutiful son of a boozy mother, a man with half-flexible principles and rock-hard opinions, a man with razor-sharp wit, sarcasm, and tons of erudition with which he sprinkles his conversations (and thoughts). He was in a half-assed relationship with a married high-school teacher, but the story ended quite ingloriously some months back. Now, he’s just drifting through his life, enjoying the comfort of his eccentric aunt’s house—she’s abroad for a Christmas trip, he’s house-sitting—and looking forward (not) to the holiday season.
Several things happen which upset his routine. First, an old “queeney” friend shows up unexpectedly. Then, Geoffrey even more unexpectedly picks up a street hustler one evening, brings him home to the house, and finds himself in the humiliating and enfuriating position of being threatened and blackmailed. Alas, Geoffrey reacts not along the lines the hustler or even he himself would have planned. One gesture leads to another, a fateful accident occurs, and lo and behold, instead of wafting through Christmas and New Year’s on a wave of boredom and despair, he suddenly has… a dead body to take care of. Not a win-win situation when one hosts said friend and expects one’s twenty-year-old nephew to come up from Toronto for an impromptu visit.
I find it hard to decide which genre this novel belongs to. It’s not a murder mystery per se—there’s a murder, granted, but no mystery whatsoever is involved. As a reader, I knew who did it, I was a witness; there’s therefore no investigation worth mentioning, and worse (morally speaking), the murderer gets off scot-free, which is also something I wanted with all my heart. It’s not a suspense novel either. Apart from one or two scenes, I didn’t wait with baited breath for what would happen to the main character. It’s above all a fun read in that sense that it’s intrinsically funny.
Now, I gather the book isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Geoffrey tells his tale in the first person, and he often goes off on multiple tangents before making his particular points. This enables him to tell the readers not only his entire life story, in ranty bits and pieces, but also his views and opinions on virtually everything, from his job to his late wife, from children to his home-town, from being gay to the special traits of the time the story is set in (the early 80s). Some will probably decide they don’t really care for that sort of diatribes in a book that’s as lightweight, plot-wise, as this one. Others, I guess, will outright hate the prose.
Almost unexplainably, I did not. I found myself highly amused, a bit like I will always be amused by the shenanigans of Jeeves and Wooster, the catfights of Mapp and Lucia, the bottomless stupidity of Selina Meyer and her team in Veep. None of these are heavy where the storyline is concerned. Yet they’re entertaining to the point of becoming almost addictive. It all boils down to good, to excellent writing. And Edward O. Phillips provides this effortlessly. The story’s main character Geoffrey is a witty man with a very naughty, sometimes even bitchy sense of humor. The side characters are also extremely colorful, from Geoffrey’s mother, who lives in the vague and oblivious numbness of high-quality alcohol, to his old friend. Even the rather humorless nephew turned out to be amusing in his own right insofar as he was so very different from his uncle.
I was told Phillips’s Chatwick series was a genuinely Canadian one. As I’m not Canadian and have never been to Canada either, I cannot say whether this is the case (I’m not even a native speaker where English is concerned, so this kind of finesse is, alas, probably beyond me). What I can say is that I enjoyed the read immensely and am looking forward to discovering the other books of the series.
Ah, Geoffrey Chadwick! He’s one of a kind—in his early fifties, Anglo-Canadian (which is no character trait in itself—or is it?) living in Montréal, long-time widower, decidedly if discreetly gay nonetheless, successful if unenthusiastic lawyer, dutiful son of a boozy mother, a man with half-flexible principles and rock-hard opinions, a man with razor-sharp wit, sarcasm, and tons of erudition with which he sprinkles his conversations (and thoughts). He was in a half-assed relationship with a married high-school teacher, but the story ended quite ingloriously some months back. Now, he’s just drifting through his life, enjoying the comfort of his eccentric aunt’s house—she’s abroad for a Christmas trip, he’s house-sitting—and looking forward (not) to the holiday season.
Several things happen which upset his routine. First, an old “queeney” friend shows up unexpectedly. Then, Geoffrey even more unexpectedly picks up a street hustler one evening, brings him home to the house, and finds himself in the humiliating and enfuriating position of being threatened and blackmailed. Alas, Geoffrey reacts not along the lines the hustler or even he himself would have planned. One gesture leads to another, a fateful accident occurs, and lo and behold, instead of wafting through Christmas and New Year’s on a wave of boredom and despair, he suddenly has… a dead body to take care of. Not a win-win situation when one hosts said friend and expects one’s twenty-year-old nephew to come up from Toronto for an impromptu visit.
I find it hard to decide which genre this novel belongs to. It’s not a murder mystery per se—there’s a murder, granted, but no mystery whatsoever is involved. As a reader, I knew who did it, I was a witness; there’s therefore no investigation worth mentioning, and worse (morally speaking), the murderer gets off scot-free, which is also something I wanted with all my heart. It’s not a suspense novel either. Apart from one or two scenes, I didn’t wait with baited breath for what would happen to the main character. It’s above all a fun read in that sense that it’s intrinsically funny.
Now, I gather the book isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Geoffrey tells his tale in the first person, and he often goes off on multiple tangents before making his particular points. This enables him to tell the readers not only his entire life story, in ranty bits and pieces, but also his views and opinions on virtually everything, from his job to his late wife, from children to his home-town, from being gay to the special traits of the time the story is set in (the early 80s). Some will probably decide they don’t really care for that sort of diatribes in a book that’s as lightweight, plot-wise, as this one. Others, I guess, will outright hate the prose.
Almost unexplainably, I did not. I found myself highly amused, a bit like I will always be amused by the shenanigans of Jeeves and Wooster, the catfights of Mapp and Lucia, the bottomless stupidity of Selina Meyer and her team in Veep. None of these are heavy where the storyline is concerned. Yet they’re entertaining to the point of becoming almost addictive. It all boils down to good, to excellent writing. And Edward O. Phillips provides this effortlessly. The story’s main character Geoffrey is a witty man with a very naughty, sometimes even bitchy sense of humor. The side characters are also extremely colorful, from Geoffrey’s mother, who lives in the vague and oblivious numbness of high-quality alcohol, to his old friend. Even the rather humorless nephew turned out to be amusing in his own right insofar as he was so very different from his uncle.
I was told Phillips’s Chatwick series was a genuinely Canadian one. As I’m not Canadian and have never been to Canada either, I cannot say whether this is the case (I’m not even a native speaker where English is concerned, so this kind of finesse is, alas, probably beyond me). What I can say is that I enjoyed the read immensely and am looking forward to discovering the other books of the series.
January 2, 2020
I read the Requeered edition and am happy it was reissued. This is the first in a series of e-books as it was not avaiable in e-book format. As my first visit to Montreal was in the early 1960's, I feel like the author captured a Montreal of my childhood. The language gives the impression of being in the past and is quite elegant. The author has a beautiful way with words that only a well-read reader will appreciate.
Read
July 30, 2020Deliciously satirical and tongue-in-cheek depiction of anglo-Montreal and many other things. The who-done-it aspect is just the occasion for these keel observation.
December 18, 2020
Meant to be a murder mystery. I didn't find it had much mystery in it. Seemed to ramble a lot and lose focus.
December 20, 2020
Funny in places but not really my cup of tea.
January 8, 2022
Re read this and enjoyed a mature gay man's wisdom and lessons learned even more than the first time. At time humorous and certainly a story with some unusual unexpected twists and turns.
February 17, 2025
The style is fusty and the humor arch. The book is firmly rooted in a particular time and place and it has grown impenetrable with age.
June 5, 2016
A re-read. Oddly, though it's the first book in the Geoffrey Chadwick series, it's not the best. An excellent intro to the character, and the milieu, but it's given to a few too many long prosy bits where Geoffrey makes observations but the story doesn't progress. Other in the series are superior.
September 3, 2019
Enjoyed this book quite a bit, it reminded me of a good friend of mine. I love a sarcastic narrator.
The book does digress quite a bit but I found the narrator witty and his friend added excellent comic relief.
Looking forward to the next in the series.
The book does digress quite a bit but I found the narrator witty and his friend added excellent comic relief.
Looking forward to the next in the series.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews