The Fetch

by Peter Everett

Hardcover - first edition. Jacket very good considering age, with only minimal signs of wear. Page block is lightly marked. Pages are clean and sound, with clear text throughout. TS

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

When I added this on Goodreads, a friend told me to stop trying to make The Fetch happen, and in a sense I suppose I was, given nobody had ever added it before. Which, for a 1970 Penguin, feels like an unusual lack of footprint. Hell, I think I only had it myself because it was 3 for 2 and I already had a pair I wanted, this one probably squeaking through on the blurb's promise of "a girl who terrifies Bruno by her inventive sexuality". Which...if that wasn't already an overclaim at the time, it makes you realise quite how crabbed and repressed the twentieth century could be. Something that could be salutary, I suppose; I've been reading Clive James lately, Roger Lewis on Burton and Taylor, getting nostalgic for that lost age of wit and pizzazz, whereas The Fetch is a constant reminder that for most people it was an age of muck, spots, grime, scurf, disappointment. Bruno, trapped in a rambling house with his disapproving dead dad's sullen factotum, an infuriating uncle and the aforementioned sexy Elf, could easily have been a sitcom set-up, except that it's never remotely funny; once or twice I was put in mind of what an Iris Murdoch novel might look like if for some inexplicable reason you shaved off most of the intellectual heft. Still, I suppose in a world grievously oversupplied with sad boner professor novels, there's at least something different – yet alphabetically adjacent – about a sad boner projectionist.