The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle, by Matt Cain

[Ulysses]

The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle
By Matt Cain
Published by John Scognamiglio, Kensington Books, 2022
Five stars

This book was a real sucker-punch for me. Not that it echoes my life at all, but Albert Entwistle is exactly my age, so his story has a kind of “there but for the grace of God go I” resonance.

The hook for the book is this: what if your coming-of-age story started at your retirement?

That lures us into a tale as heart-breaking as it is heartwarming. The reader is not promised a happy ending, but we are promised a journey of self-discovery. That was enough to convince me.

Albert Entwistle is a postman in Toddington, England. His dad was a constable and his mum a housewife. They lived in a two-up-two-down council house when Albert was a boy. Indeed, Albert still lives there, eighteen years after his mother’s death. Albert has spent his entire career, since the age of 18, focused on doing his job precisely and correctly. He observes everyone about him—both at the Royal Mail office and on his rounds of delivery to some 600 homes. What Albert does not do is make friends. He interacts with people at the absolute minimum level required for civility. He knows who everybody is, but knows nothing at all about them.

At first I was assuming that Albert was somewhere on the spectrum. As it turns out, it’s simply that he is so trapped in his personal unhappiness that he doesn’t even know how lonely he is. This is his life and this is where he feels comfortable. Until, that is, the Christmas before his 65th birthday.

Matt Cain has meticulously structured a complicated storyline, with flashbacks and a host of diverse characters who start out as ciphers and become hugely important. It is clearly a fantasy, but feels so true that it hurts. It is, in its own little English way, as epic as The Lord of the Rings, right up to the throwing of the Ring of Power into the fires of Mount Doom. Only the Ring of Power in this story is nothing more than Albert’s unhappy memories, which we all find out are quite bad enough.

This is Albert’s journey. At the start we might think he’s weird. We also might feel sorry for him. As the story is unrolled, we grow to love him and root for him. As a gay man who grew up on the other side of an ocean at the same time, I have to say that my eyes were wet a lot as I read. I never went through what Albert did; but I have known plenty of people who have. Matt Cain manages to teach us a great historical lesson without ever taking his focus off this good, wounded man and the life he must reclaim.

I loved it. Even the unhappy parts.