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The Oversight
A flawless fictional debut from a great young writer, shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award.
In 1983, an ordinary teenager called Daniel Rathbone fell in love, spurned a friend, and stumbled on the ability to see in the dark. On his twenty-fifth birthday, Daniel is bequeathed a second no less unusual gift - a Victorian writing box, the legacy of his father and the repository of his youthful secrets, and of his current feelings of guilt. When a visit from the once-spurned friend, Carey Schumacher, coincides with the death of a contemporary, Daniel's peculiar endowments are enlisted to make lasting sense of lost time and place.
From Bath to Brixton, from the 1960s to the 90s, The Oversight follows a trail of thwarted and victorious affections. It is an intently comic tale of vision and delusion; of family, friendship and desertion; and of the divisively cruel need to belong. A multi-layered debut of distinction.
In 1983, an ordinary teenager called Daniel Rathbone fell in love, spurned a friend, and stumbled on the ability to see in the dark. On his twenty-fifth birthday, Daniel is bequeathed a second no less unusual gift - a Victorian writing box, the legacy of his father and the repository of his youthful secrets, and of his current feelings of guilt. When a visit from the once-spurned friend, Carey Schumacher, coincides with the death of a contemporary, Daniel's peculiar endowments are enlisted to make lasting sense of lost time and place.
From Bath to Brixton, from the 1960s to the 90s, The Oversight follows a trail of thwarted and victorious affections. It is an intently comic tale of vision and delusion; of family, friendship and desertion; and of the divisively cruel need to belong. A multi-layered debut of distinction.
288 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2001
31 people want to read
About the author
Will Eaves
19 books23 followersWill was born in Bath in 1967 and educated at Beechen Cliff School and King’s College, Cambridge.
After a brief spell as an actor and several years in trade journalism, he began writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1992 and joined the paper as its Arts Editor in 1995. He left in 2011 to become an Associate Professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.
In 2020, he judged the Goldsmiths Prize and was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 2016, he was a Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Library.
He has written five novels, two books of poetry, and one volume of literary essays, and is represented by Carrie Plitt at Felicity Bryan Associates in Oxford.
He has given talks, seminars and readings around the world: at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Royal Society, the National Geographic Science Festival, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Shakespeare and Co Bookshop, Medicine Unboxed, Belfast Book Festival, the Goldsmiths Prize Readings, Gay’s The Word Bookshop, Poetry East, the Mildura Writers’ Festival, Vout-O-Reenee‘s, and the University of Melbourne.
He has appeared several times on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, with Ian Macmillan, and on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week and Open Book. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
He edits mss, grows trees, writes piano music, and lives in Brixton.
After a brief spell as an actor and several years in trade journalism, he began writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1992 and joined the paper as its Arts Editor in 1995. He left in 2011 to become an Associate Professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.
In 2020, he judged the Goldsmiths Prize and was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 2016, he was a Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Library.
He has written five novels, two books of poetry, and one volume of literary essays, and is represented by Carrie Plitt at Felicity Bryan Associates in Oxford.
He has given talks, seminars and readings around the world: at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Royal Society, the National Geographic Science Festival, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Shakespeare and Co Bookshop, Medicine Unboxed, Belfast Book Festival, the Goldsmiths Prize Readings, Gay’s The Word Bookshop, Poetry East, the Mildura Writers’ Festival, Vout-O-Reenee‘s, and the University of Melbourne.
He has appeared several times on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, with Ian Macmillan, and on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week and Open Book. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
He edits mss, grows trees, writes piano music, and lives in Brixton.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 17, 2018
For a good portion of this 2001 novel, shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, I wasn’t sure where I was going, or if the destination would justify the journey. But the combination of place and character, the particulars of a teenage object of love that continues to burn deep into adulthood, coalesced into something fine and poignant, suffused with a sense of loss and nostalgia. Daniel Rathbone is a high school student in Bath, besotted with Gregory Bray, a cross-country runner. We jump back and forth in time, with varying degrees of success and see Rathbone as an out gay man in London rather oddly irritated with his mother; we see his mother as a young art student being pursued by his father. In letters, we see his father losing battle with cancer. It doesn’t all work—the character of Carey Schumaker, a picked-upon student who turns the tables on them all—never fully comes to life, and the scenes in which we follow the courtship of Daniel Rathbone’s parents might as well come from a different novel. The book is most alive when it’s fully inhabited by Rathbone, especially in his early fumbling with Craig Spillings, and later in a London backroom.
March 1, 2014
Very disappointing. Set partly in my birthplace, Bath, and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award 2001 this held lots of promise but failed to deliver. Well written but with a slow plot, it failed to hold my interest.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews