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The Taxi Queue
Since publishing her first, critically acclaimed novel English Correspondence, Janet Davey has become known for her ability to write brilliantly about characters driven to break free of the self-imposed limits and social conventions that hem them in. Candia McWilliam says of her work, 'It secures one's faith in the moral force of art'. Davey's third novel opens with a chance meeting between Abe and Richard in a taxi queue outside Paddington station. Abe is in his early twenties, a time when life is still fluid. Richard is married with two daughters. He and his wife, Vivienne, live in suburban security in Middlesex and attend an evangelical Christian church. Yet Richard's meeting with Abe opens a door he thought he had closed forever. With Vivienne and the children away on a skiing holiday, he invites Abe into his house - an impulsive action that will send ripples not only through his own life and that of his wife, but through the fragile existence of Abe's younger sister Kirsty, who is herself unsure what is the best way to 'settle down'.Set on the peripheries of London - in Harrow, Crystal Palace and Kensal Rise - this remarkable novel places centre-stage the events and emotions of ordinary life that rarely find their way into fiction of this quality. Davey has an extraordinary talent for digging away the accidents of fate that define us to find the truth of who we are.
208 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 14, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 9, 2014
This started off as an okay read, with Abe meeting complete stranger Richard in a taxi queue at a railway station and they end up having a one-night stand; this set the scene for what could have been several promising storylines but none of them were really developed, either from a continuing relationship point of view or concerning the effect this could have had on the characters' other relationships to any great extent so overall a bit disappointing. Only 5/10 for me.
December 11, 2009
Dull tale, insipid ineffectual characters, nothing at all happens. If this sounds like your kind of book, you'll love The Taxi Queue. In my case i was temped to throw it out of my 20th floor window on finishing reading it. Utter time waster. Thank god it was short.
November 5, 2016
It was an Ok read, but the characterisation was a bit flat.
August 22, 2007
A nice review in the Guardian tipped me off to this one...A really lovely, if quiet, book.
April 22, 2017
Perhaps I'm doing this little novel an injustice (because I read it in the middle of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires, a time when my mind was numb and my emotions frayed) but I found it rather odd and faintly repellent. The blurb compared Davey's writing to that of Penelope Fitzgerald but I fail to see any resemblance at all.
The Taxi Queue is about Richard: a very ordinary, conservative man, with a good job, nice house, nice family (two kids, churchy wife) - and he picks up gay men for casual sex. He does this with Abe (at the taxi queue). Abe is a much younger, somewhat lazy sort of creative type who occasionally does drugs. Abe and his sister Kirsty inherited a London house from their estranged father; he lives upstairs and she lives downstairs. They're not close. Kirsty has a layabout boyfriend called Luka that she is having trouble persuading to leave.
It's a curiously disconnected tale. Jerky discontinuous sentences, a surfeit of trivial detail that seems to lead nowhere, and a cast of characters that have no appeal at all. When Vivienne, Richard's wife finds the card with Abe's phone number on it, and traipses across London to Kirsty's place only to be told a lot of lies by Abe, I found myself not caring whether Richard was exposed or not. This is not how I expected to react: in general I don't have much time for bi-men who cheat on their unknowing wives and expose them to health risks. But Vivienne was such a cardboard cut-out character that I failed to feel for her.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2009/02/11/t...
The Taxi Queue is about Richard: a very ordinary, conservative man, with a good job, nice house, nice family (two kids, churchy wife) - and he picks up gay men for casual sex. He does this with Abe (at the taxi queue). Abe is a much younger, somewhat lazy sort of creative type who occasionally does drugs. Abe and his sister Kirsty inherited a London house from their estranged father; he lives upstairs and she lives downstairs. They're not close. Kirsty has a layabout boyfriend called Luka that she is having trouble persuading to leave.
It's a curiously disconnected tale. Jerky discontinuous sentences, a surfeit of trivial detail that seems to lead nowhere, and a cast of characters that have no appeal at all. When Vivienne, Richard's wife finds the card with Abe's phone number on it, and traipses across London to Kirsty's place only to be told a lot of lies by Abe, I found myself not caring whether Richard was exposed or not. This is not how I expected to react: in general I don't have much time for bi-men who cheat on their unknowing wives and expose them to health risks. But Vivienne was such a cardboard cut-out character that I failed to feel for her.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2009/02/11/t...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews