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Nothing To Be Afraid Of
An earthquake strikes at the heart of London, its epicenter a theatre where a lavish production of "The Tempest" has just opened. Thus the scene is set for Will Eaves's gloriously deft tragicomedy of our time. "Nothing To Be Afraid Of" is both a lament for hope abandoned and innocence betrayed, and an exquisite comic pageant of Shakespearian vitality and compassion: an incidental theatrical history, across the twentieth century, of the art of pretence; of patience, trust and loyalty; of folly in youth and unforgivable old age.
'Tender, playful and full of beautifully observed descriptions of growing up and growing old . . . with some terrific comic set-pieces the equal of anything in Waugh and Wodehouse. Now that's good writing' " Daily Telegraph"
'In the case of his novel, Eaves has nothing to be afraid of. This deft, absorbing book more than confirms the promise of "The Oversight." Eaves is a master of the dark arts of city fiction. He is to be read, relished and watched very closely' "Independent"
'"Nothing To Be Afraid Of "provides several coups de theatre . . . it] is a tragicomic tale of secrets, a drowned daughter, infidelity and mistaken identity . . . It is so clever, so apt, so right that you have no option but to read the novel with its built-in encore all over again. It seems even better the second time round' " Sunday Telegraph"
'Tender, playful and full of beautifully observed descriptions of growing up and growing old . . . with some terrific comic set-pieces the equal of anything in Waugh and Wodehouse. Now that's good writing' " Daily Telegraph"
'In the case of his novel, Eaves has nothing to be afraid of. This deft, absorbing book more than confirms the promise of "The Oversight." Eaves is a master of the dark arts of city fiction. He is to be read, relished and watched very closely' "Independent"
'"Nothing To Be Afraid Of "provides several coups de theatre . . . it] is a tragicomic tale of secrets, a drowned daughter, infidelity and mistaken identity . . . It is so clever, so apt, so right that you have no option but to read the novel with its built-in encore all over again. It seems even better the second time round' " Sunday Telegraph"
336 pages, Paperback
First published May 4, 2005
1 person is currently reading
22 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 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 16, 2017
Will Eaves's The Absent Therapist was one of my favourite novels of 2015, and yet another wonderful discovery courtesy of the Goldsmiths Prize. In my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) I commented that The Absent Therapist stretched the novel form close to breaking point, indeed arguably it qualified as a novel purely because the author tells us that was his intention, with shades of the micro-fiction of Lydia Davis and the polyphonic voices of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, yet with a distinctive approach of Eaves's own.
Thinking while I'm thinking this that Owen is very troubled, when he stared right at me and I realised he didn't have anyone to talk to. And maybe not much sense of what he'd said. Or: he needed to be contradicted in some way, as if what he was saying was "Tell me what's wrong with what I've said. Talk to me." ... So I excused myself and went to the toilet. While I was there, it occurred to me that Owen had been addressing an ideal person, a sort of absent therapist, and I felt sorry for him. Sorry for me, too, later. The toilet was awash. My trainers got soaked and no one would sit next to me on the night bus, which stopped for ages outside the British Interplanetary Association in Vauxhall. Where do they go for their day trips? That's what I'd like to know."
It was a pleasant surprise to be contacted recently via Twitter by the author, who, seeing both my review and the note in my profile that I am a AFC Wimbledon supporter, drew my attention to this book, as he had 'briefly put the team, disguised as Merton Wanderers, in a novel called Nothing To Be Afraid Of.'
Nothing To Be Afraid Of certainly showcases Eaves's versatility as it is a very different book: much more of a conventional novel (i.e. with things like a story, and fleshed out characters etc) and with prose as lush as that of The Absent Therapist was pared back.
The novel focuses on life in the theatre, and pivots around a production of The Tempest. Unlike Margaret Atwood's recent Hag-Seed, this novel doesn’t attempt a retelling of the play, but the plot is certainly Shakespearean in the broader sense with entangled characters, concealed identities, dramatic last acts even a pivotal earthquake.
The novel opens with two young sisters Alice (9) and Martha (6) at the seaside with their parents Ray and Lilian waiting at the stage door of a rather run-down theatre to meet Tony Glass, a variety show actor and old family friend.
The white shed of the Theatre was separated from the fisherman’s huts at the west end of the beah by a squalid alley of shingle and tarmac. Scummy water sluiced down the alley, bubbling over shreds of discarded bunting ... the Hutchings family waited for ten minutes beneath an illuminated sign with features that read ‘age d or’. It took four knocks before the door was finally thrust open by a thin man in his forties with cold cream on his face.
‘Yes’ he said, not even looking at the visitors.
Ray Hutchings chuckled nervously and jiggled the car keys in his pocket. He still saw Tony Glass every two years or so – usually when Tony had been without work for a while – but their rapport was never easy or instant. It had to be re-cued each time they met, and always, Ray felt, to the actor’s advantage.
Alice takes after her rather portly father, while slim, athletic Martha is her mother’s favourite. (Indeed we later find ):
At the wharf's end, father and daughter climbed down to the sloping harbour beach , where Alice felt her confidence return. The ore-streaked rubble and grey boulders favoured a ruminative approach which ill suited the light weights in the family. She saw Lilian and Martha, yards behind, making their way towards her in the lee of the breakwater, turning their ankles on the stones, crying out.
The novel then moves 15 year or so. Alice has spent her time at and after university trying to break into the acting world, but with diminishing returns. She now makes a living of sorts doing guided walking tours of London, and writing theatre reviews for a free periodical. While Martha, with little professed interest in acting, has nevertheless succeeded where her sister has failed, playing Miranda in a production of The Tempest, shortly expected to move to the West End. The contrast between the two sisters remains, this time from Martha’s perspective:
It was Martha's custom, when piqued, to find a way of making those who had displeased her feel left out, and a telling silence or pointed look often did the trick. She was an economist by instinct and training (although like her father she had repudiated science) and retained a value for the shortest way to the desired effect. But Martha was also highly sensitive to the matter of her sister's intelligence, which took the long way round everything, and, at a deeper, more impenetrably vexed level, could not bring herself to treat it realistically - 'She won't get far in this profession, if that’s how she goes on' was her private judgement. So the intelligence became a matter of flip legend ('Alice is so clever') or a useless luxury, like a cloak of invisibility. The social implication was that her bigger, slower sister dwelt on situations and opportunities instead of grasping them. At the same time, the ruminatory approach was not without a sense of threat, and Martha often felt as though she was being watched.
In this case she is literally being watched as Alice is in the audience, and writing a review which ends up being published, under a pseudonym in The Independent. An article Martha doesn’t initially know Martha wrote and which plays an important role in her personal life.
During the production London is hit by a, in plot terms symbolic rather than of direct consequence, earthquake, 4.8 on the Richter scale: mild by world standards but still the strongest to hit southern England for a century. At the same time, the elderly actor playing Caliban, Leslie, a corpulent alcoholic and old-school drag artiste, becomes incapacitated during the interval and, with the seconds already in action, Alice steps into the breach, at her sister’s suggestion which is both kindly and slightly spiteful: it's one scene and she's the same size.
Eaves is strong on the artifice of theatre, the reality beneath the greasepaint. When she steps out on to the stage, in what should be a dream come true, Martha realises how unlike anything resembling art the whole business was of standing up and shouting things out. How sweaty and makeshift the illusion seemed from the inside. Porphyry and jasper? The pillars were MDF wrapped in sheets of marbled vinyl. The fountain's granitic casing was Styrofoam. Glue, sawdust and fabric conditioner flavoured the air.
The characters then become increasingly entangled. Alice ends the night in bed with Nick, one of the other actors, who proves to be an unreliable partner, an ex-lover of Martha, and the son of Tony (now Anthony) Glass from the novel’s opening, now owner of a talent agency, whose star client is Bob Ladd, playing Prospero in the play and Leslie’s long-standing bête noire. Alice is commissioned by Anthony Glass to ghost write Leslie’s memoirs, parts of which are set out verbatim in the novel, and which reveal how closely the lives of Leslie, Tony, Ray and Lilian are linked, as well as the relationships with Neville (a fellow critic with Alice but also composer of the play’s score) and Beatrice, first (platonic) love of Leslie, later to become Tony’s first wife, now in a mental hospital.
In his memoirs, Leslie recalls watching a just-past-his-prime Nureyev, running across the stage like a skater with the ice breaking beneath him.
I was in a shell, watching the shell of a man do things badly that he had once done well. And we carried on praising him. You could be a shell and the world of form and manners and polite selfishness would treat you as it always had, out of fear. That was the sound of the ice breaking: the awful whisper that the world's attention was just another way of taking no real notice. That even the most adoring gaze was, in the end, averted. I drank more to avoid a second conclusion, and couldn't. When the people you grow up admiring - actors, writers, singers, footballers, teachers - can still do what they do, then you can feel that you're young. When they start to fail, that's the beginning of the end.
My one reservation about the novel is that the richness and pathos of the prose is so absorbing that, unfortunately, I rather lost track of the tangled links between the characters. So much so that the dramatic events of the novel’s final act () rather passed me by.
And the world of the theatre is one in which I have little personal interest or knowledge. It was easy to sympathise with one of the actors in the book, watching a conversation between two musicians, as I felt much the same way at times in the book:
Musicians speak a different, private language. It was like watching two kittens with a ball of string, both absorbed until the ball unravels.
As for my key interest, AFC Wimbledon – well here I wasn’t so sure Eaves did the team justice! Merton Wanderers are an ailing Ryman’s League side: AFC struggled relatively in the Ryman’s but only relative to their stellar ascent up the pyramid before and after – reaching the playoffs two times before a third successful season saw them promoted. And space doesn't allow mention of the club’s unique history and ethos. On the other hand it was hard to argue with the description of the journey to the ground on the very route I take:
The train took Alice to Raynes Park and the 131 Bus to Kingston Road.
The upper deck was reassuringly full of overweight men and women wearing the colours of Merton Casuals: black and green strip with a red-eyed Phoenix for a shield and a sponsors' logo (TLS Haulage). The kids wore hats: the men looked as if they were expecting: the women passed round Zeppelins of coke.
But overall, another striking, if very different and perhaps less to my personal taste, work from Eaves.
4 stars for the novel although 3 for my personal reading experience. Rounded up to 4 for now.
Thinking while I'm thinking this that Owen is very troubled, when he stared right at me and I realised he didn't have anyone to talk to. And maybe not much sense of what he'd said. Or: he needed to be contradicted in some way, as if what he was saying was "Tell me what's wrong with what I've said. Talk to me." ... So I excused myself and went to the toilet. While I was there, it occurred to me that Owen had been addressing an ideal person, a sort of absent therapist, and I felt sorry for him. Sorry for me, too, later. The toilet was awash. My trainers got soaked and no one would sit next to me on the night bus, which stopped for ages outside the British Interplanetary Association in Vauxhall. Where do they go for their day trips? That's what I'd like to know."
It was a pleasant surprise to be contacted recently via Twitter by the author, who, seeing both my review and the note in my profile that I am a AFC Wimbledon supporter, drew my attention to this book, as he had 'briefly put the team, disguised as Merton Wanderers, in a novel called Nothing To Be Afraid Of.'
Nothing To Be Afraid Of certainly showcases Eaves's versatility as it is a very different book: much more of a conventional novel (i.e. with things like a story, and fleshed out characters etc) and with prose as lush as that of The Absent Therapist was pared back.
The novel focuses on life in the theatre, and pivots around a production of The Tempest. Unlike Margaret Atwood's recent Hag-Seed, this novel doesn’t attempt a retelling of the play, but the plot is certainly Shakespearean in the broader sense with entangled characters, concealed identities, dramatic last acts even a pivotal earthquake.
The novel opens with two young sisters Alice (9) and Martha (6) at the seaside with their parents Ray and Lilian waiting at the stage door of a rather run-down theatre to meet Tony Glass, a variety show actor and old family friend.
The white shed of the Theatre was separated from the fisherman’s huts at the west end of the beah by a squalid alley of shingle and tarmac. Scummy water sluiced down the alley, bubbling over shreds of discarded bunting ... the Hutchings family waited for ten minutes beneath an illuminated sign with features that read ‘age d or’. It took four knocks before the door was finally thrust open by a thin man in his forties with cold cream on his face.
‘Yes’ he said, not even looking at the visitors.
Ray Hutchings chuckled nervously and jiggled the car keys in his pocket. He still saw Tony Glass every two years or so – usually when Tony had been without work for a while – but their rapport was never easy or instant. It had to be re-cued each time they met, and always, Ray felt, to the actor’s advantage.
Alice takes after her rather portly father, while slim, athletic Martha is her mother’s favourite. (Indeed we later find ):
At the wharf's end, father and daughter climbed down to the sloping harbour beach , where Alice felt her confidence return. The ore-streaked rubble and grey boulders favoured a ruminative approach which ill suited the light weights in the family. She saw Lilian and Martha, yards behind, making their way towards her in the lee of the breakwater, turning their ankles on the stones, crying out.
The novel then moves 15 year or so. Alice has spent her time at and after university trying to break into the acting world, but with diminishing returns. She now makes a living of sorts doing guided walking tours of London, and writing theatre reviews for a free periodical. While Martha, with little professed interest in acting, has nevertheless succeeded where her sister has failed, playing Miranda in a production of The Tempest, shortly expected to move to the West End. The contrast between the two sisters remains, this time from Martha’s perspective:
It was Martha's custom, when piqued, to find a way of making those who had displeased her feel left out, and a telling silence or pointed look often did the trick. She was an economist by instinct and training (although like her father she had repudiated science) and retained a value for the shortest way to the desired effect. But Martha was also highly sensitive to the matter of her sister's intelligence, which took the long way round everything, and, at a deeper, more impenetrably vexed level, could not bring herself to treat it realistically - 'She won't get far in this profession, if that’s how she goes on' was her private judgement. So the intelligence became a matter of flip legend ('Alice is so clever') or a useless luxury, like a cloak of invisibility. The social implication was that her bigger, slower sister dwelt on situations and opportunities instead of grasping them. At the same time, the ruminatory approach was not without a sense of threat, and Martha often felt as though she was being watched.
In this case she is literally being watched as Alice is in the audience, and writing a review which ends up being published, under a pseudonym in The Independent. An article Martha doesn’t initially know Martha wrote and which plays an important role in her personal life.
During the production London is hit by a, in plot terms symbolic rather than of direct consequence, earthquake, 4.8 on the Richter scale: mild by world standards but still the strongest to hit southern England for a century. At the same time, the elderly actor playing Caliban, Leslie, a corpulent alcoholic and old-school drag artiste, becomes incapacitated during the interval and, with the seconds already in action, Alice steps into the breach, at her sister’s suggestion which is both kindly and slightly spiteful: it's one scene and she's the same size.
Eaves is strong on the artifice of theatre, the reality beneath the greasepaint. When she steps out on to the stage, in what should be a dream come true, Martha realises how unlike anything resembling art the whole business was of standing up and shouting things out. How sweaty and makeshift the illusion seemed from the inside. Porphyry and jasper? The pillars were MDF wrapped in sheets of marbled vinyl. The fountain's granitic casing was Styrofoam. Glue, sawdust and fabric conditioner flavoured the air.
The characters then become increasingly entangled. Alice ends the night in bed with Nick, one of the other actors, who proves to be an unreliable partner, an ex-lover of Martha, and the son of Tony (now Anthony) Glass from the novel’s opening, now owner of a talent agency, whose star client is Bob Ladd, playing Prospero in the play and Leslie’s long-standing bête noire. Alice is commissioned by Anthony Glass to ghost write Leslie’s memoirs, parts of which are set out verbatim in the novel, and which reveal how closely the lives of Leslie, Tony, Ray and Lilian are linked, as well as the relationships with Neville (a fellow critic with Alice but also composer of the play’s score) and Beatrice, first (platonic) love of Leslie, later to become Tony’s first wife, now in a mental hospital.
In his memoirs, Leslie recalls watching a just-past-his-prime Nureyev, running across the stage like a skater with the ice breaking beneath him.
I was in a shell, watching the shell of a man do things badly that he had once done well. And we carried on praising him. You could be a shell and the world of form and manners and polite selfishness would treat you as it always had, out of fear. That was the sound of the ice breaking: the awful whisper that the world's attention was just another way of taking no real notice. That even the most adoring gaze was, in the end, averted. I drank more to avoid a second conclusion, and couldn't. When the people you grow up admiring - actors, writers, singers, footballers, teachers - can still do what they do, then you can feel that you're young. When they start to fail, that's the beginning of the end.
My one reservation about the novel is that the richness and pathos of the prose is so absorbing that, unfortunately, I rather lost track of the tangled links between the characters. So much so that the dramatic events of the novel’s final act () rather passed me by.
And the world of the theatre is one in which I have little personal interest or knowledge. It was easy to sympathise with one of the actors in the book, watching a conversation between two musicians, as I felt much the same way at times in the book:
Musicians speak a different, private language. It was like watching two kittens with a ball of string, both absorbed until the ball unravels.
As for my key interest, AFC Wimbledon – well here I wasn’t so sure Eaves did the team justice! Merton Wanderers are an ailing Ryman’s League side: AFC struggled relatively in the Ryman’s but only relative to their stellar ascent up the pyramid before and after – reaching the playoffs two times before a third successful season saw them promoted. And space doesn't allow mention of the club’s unique history and ethos. On the other hand it was hard to argue with the description of the journey to the ground on the very route I take:
The train took Alice to Raynes Park and the 131 Bus to Kingston Road.
The upper deck was reassuringly full of overweight men and women wearing the colours of Merton Casuals: black and green strip with a red-eyed Phoenix for a shield and a sponsors' logo (TLS Haulage). The kids wore hats: the men looked as if they were expecting: the women passed round Zeppelins of coke.
But overall, another striking, if very different and perhaps less to my personal taste, work from Eaves.
4 stars for the novel although 3 for my personal reading experience. Rounded up to 4 for now.
December 27, 2010
An unusual and unusually understated book - I'm not sure I can describe it adequately. Sibling rivalry, double identities, a madwoman not in an attic, an earthquake in London, actors, being gay in the early 70s (before it was 'ok' to be gay) - this novel has a lot going on. Well worth the read though - the characters are all compelling in their own ways.
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August 2, 2011I wouldn't bother if I were you.....
August 20, 2019
There is something particularly off-putting about the narrative of this book - a style perhaps, or a manner, or maybe just Eaves' mastication of ordinary words - that left me cold. And frustrated. Scenarios and situations, motives and desires are described in such an odd manner and often so cryptically that frequent re-reads are required to fully understand a scene. And few of the characters are particularly believable or even likeable enough to make you want to...
'Well, that's true-to- life then, isn't it' I hear you say, 'the world's full of unlikeable people...' But no, not to that extent. At least in real life one tends to value and trust one's inner voice at a minimum. In 'Nothing To Be Afraid Of.' even the narration isn't clearly reliable or unreliable, leaving one pinning one's hopes on the actions of the characters to explain what's happening or happened. But they prove to be so conceited one tends not to care about them either. It all leads to a floundering and ultimately unsatisfying read - for me at least.
In a word, 'Nothing To Be Afraid Of.' is pretentious. In two, it's stilted extravagance. I don't need any more words to describe it.
'Well, that's true-to- life then, isn't it' I hear you say, 'the world's full of unlikeable people...' But no, not to that extent. At least in real life one tends to value and trust one's inner voice at a minimum. In 'Nothing To Be Afraid Of.' even the narration isn't clearly reliable or unreliable, leaving one pinning one's hopes on the actions of the characters to explain what's happening or happened. But they prove to be so conceited one tends not to care about them either. It all leads to a floundering and ultimately unsatisfying read - for me at least.
In a word, 'Nothing To Be Afraid Of.' is pretentious. In two, it's stilted extravagance. I don't need any more words to describe it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews