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Separate Tracks
This is a novel about Orph, a strange, silent and friendless young man taken up by a young woman who offers him a room in her house. It is written by the author of "The Ice is Singing" and "Her Living Image" for which she won the Somerset Maugham Award.
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First published August 23, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 25, 2024
A solid slab of eighties social realism featuring a glittering array of class schisms, strikes, well-meaning wishy-washy liberals, and an unsound care-home orphan nicknamed Orph around which the zeitgeist revolves. Perfect for fans of vintage eighties violence à la Alan Clarke and early Mike Leigh.
August 27, 2021
The distressing tale of young Orph, real name Anthony John Childs. Orph, short for orphan, is the taunt thrown at him by other children when he attends school and they discover that he lives in a Children's Home. He is not intelligent, he is not even average – in any respect. He lacks friends and the ability to win any. He has nothing resembling ambition or even an awareness that there must be a future for him. And sadly the society he is swimming in has no ambition for him either. If ever a boy had REJECT stamped on his forehead it was Orph.
And then there is comfortable, middle class Emma. The only daughter of a not-too-happily married couple who knows that she has a future mapped out for her: work hard at school, win exam successes, go to university, get a decent career, and then live like her mother. Things start to go awry when she takes a gap year job helping a carer look after a group of children whose parents have proved incapable of looking after them. One of whom is Orph.
It is difficult to read this book with a mind set in today's world. Unless one views it as at least partly historical then so much appears unsatisfactory, awkward and sometimes downright unpleasant. Attitudes expressed are those of the 1970s and early 80s in Britain: social unrest, class warfare, lack of tolerance, student agitation, strikes and marches, the rise of anti-union, anti-welfare Conservatism alongside old fashioned militant Trotskyist socialism, and racial prejudice (directed mainly against what were seen as West Indian immigrants; Islamophobia hadn't really taken off at that time.) Some of the author's comments are awkward and one section, if it was not meant to be read with some degree of irony directed at the racists, is simply offensive.
When Orph comes across a police constable on the street he apparently sees him as “another pedestrian...with a strangely bell-shaped head.” There is nothing in the story to suggest that Orph is so stupid as to be unable to understand that he is seeing a man wearing a tall hat and has grown up unaware of the appearance of a policeman. A line of police officers is compared against a group of striking workers on picket duty: “Their neat uniforms contrasted starkly with the men's shabby layers against the cold.” It makes it sound as if we have been thrown back into Dickensian London. Why would the men's clothing be shabby? They are working men protesting not a gang of urchins from the Poor House.
And then there's that piece, which describes protesters marching against discrimination: “They were nearly all black, and Emma was struck, and then immediately made guilty by, the sheer otherness of them. They looked so strange – like cattle, she thought, the same big prominent bones and swinging movements. They wore clothes as if they were decorations, all bright bits of things, sparkling crimson, yellow, bright green – the girls with tiny shiny plaits bristling all over their heads. She was frightened because they were so different, and felt she must be an obvious target for their dislike, being small and twitchy, pale and drab.” It's a little breathtaking.
The novel has its share of swearing, sex and intercourse, and quite a lot of violence at the end, but it is all written as if the author feels that such things need to be there because that is the way the lower classes and students speak and behave. Unfortunately even among the lower classes and students there has never been a uniformity of speech or behaviour and it all sounds wooden and unreal a little too often. I have given the book two stars - as a 2021 reader. If I had read it in 1983, it may have been four or four and a half. That is just the way life and opinion changes in thirty-eight years.
And then there is comfortable, middle class Emma. The only daughter of a not-too-happily married couple who knows that she has a future mapped out for her: work hard at school, win exam successes, go to university, get a decent career, and then live like her mother. Things start to go awry when she takes a gap year job helping a carer look after a group of children whose parents have proved incapable of looking after them. One of whom is Orph.
It is difficult to read this book with a mind set in today's world. Unless one views it as at least partly historical then so much appears unsatisfactory, awkward and sometimes downright unpleasant. Attitudes expressed are those of the 1970s and early 80s in Britain: social unrest, class warfare, lack of tolerance, student agitation, strikes and marches, the rise of anti-union, anti-welfare Conservatism alongside old fashioned militant Trotskyist socialism, and racial prejudice (directed mainly against what were seen as West Indian immigrants; Islamophobia hadn't really taken off at that time.) Some of the author's comments are awkward and one section, if it was not meant to be read with some degree of irony directed at the racists, is simply offensive.
When Orph comes across a police constable on the street he apparently sees him as “another pedestrian...with a strangely bell-shaped head.” There is nothing in the story to suggest that Orph is so stupid as to be unable to understand that he is seeing a man wearing a tall hat and has grown up unaware of the appearance of a policeman. A line of police officers is compared against a group of striking workers on picket duty: “Their neat uniforms contrasted starkly with the men's shabby layers against the cold.” It makes it sound as if we have been thrown back into Dickensian London. Why would the men's clothing be shabby? They are working men protesting not a gang of urchins from the Poor House.
And then there's that piece, which describes protesters marching against discrimination: “They were nearly all black, and Emma was struck, and then immediately made guilty by, the sheer otherness of them. They looked so strange – like cattle, she thought, the same big prominent bones and swinging movements. They wore clothes as if they were decorations, all bright bits of things, sparkling crimson, yellow, bright green – the girls with tiny shiny plaits bristling all over their heads. She was frightened because they were so different, and felt she must be an obvious target for their dislike, being small and twitchy, pale and drab.” It's a little breathtaking.
The novel has its share of swearing, sex and intercourse, and quite a lot of violence at the end, but it is all written as if the author feels that such things need to be there because that is the way the lower classes and students speak and behave. Unfortunately even among the lower classes and students there has never been a uniformity of speech or behaviour and it all sounds wooden and unreal a little too often. I have given the book two stars - as a 2021 reader. If I had read it in 1983, it may have been four or four and a half. That is just the way life and opinion changes in thirty-eight years.
September 15, 2021
I love how the writer described the scenes; the little details made it more interesting
But what I didn't like was the slow pace. Initially it felt like a twist will follow everything that is happening but the twist did not happen.
But what I didn't like was the slow pace. Initially it felt like a twist will follow everything that is happening but the twist did not happen.
March 27, 2014
Amazon Blurb, as Goodreads doesn't have one:
Orph is a strange, silent, friendless young man. Emma meets him when she comes to work at the children's home where he lives. She offers him a room in her student flat. But there, amid the love affairs and politics of university life, Orph's alienation only grows deeper, and his lonely course has the most desperate of consequences.
I actually hated this book. Even though - or maybe because - I found myself compelled to complete it.
I found every character hateful, every motivation suspect, every turn of the page utterly depressing. Navel-gazing has never appealed to me, and the Sixties (which is when I think this book was set) a time I lived through and did not enjoy.
And yet, I had to know what happened.
Maybe that's the sign of a good book.
I don't think it helped that I mistakenly loaded this onto my Kindle rather than The Testament of Jessie Lamb, so I was disappointed before I started.
Orph is a strange, silent, friendless young man. Emma meets him when she comes to work at the children's home where he lives. She offers him a room in her student flat. But there, amid the love affairs and politics of university life, Orph's alienation only grows deeper, and his lonely course has the most desperate of consequences.
I actually hated this book. Even though - or maybe because - I found myself compelled to complete it.
I found every character hateful, every motivation suspect, every turn of the page utterly depressing. Navel-gazing has never appealed to me, and the Sixties (which is when I think this book was set) a time I lived through and did not enjoy.
And yet, I had to know what happened.
Maybe that's the sign of a good book.
I don't think it helped that I mistakenly loaded this onto my Kindle rather than The Testament of Jessie Lamb, so I was disappointed before I started.
May 24, 2014
This was quite an interesting read. I enjoyed it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews