About Time by Michael Estorick (Arcadia, £14.99)
Michael Estorick’s latest, enjoyable novel deals with the notion that, if life doesn’t exactly begin at 60, it can shift up a gear or two. The setting is England in the early 21st century. Arsene Wenger is managing Arsenal, nobody has heard of Brexit.
Two old school-friends are approaching their seventh decades. Bill, a businessman with a questionable taste in ties, is keeping up with his BUPA payments; Pete, an artist who works in adult education, has to rely on the NHS.
Both men take their milestone birthdays as the occasion for existential reassessment, the outcomes of which cause significant, and often hilarious disruption for themselves and others, especially their partners.
In Bill and Pete, Estorick has created a double-act of clearly delineated and strongly contrasted characters. The asymmetries between them are such that you might wonder what holds their friendship together. Certainly they do.
About Time does not give a simple explanation for their odd-couple bond but instead offers a more general celebration of unity in difference, yin and yang.
The plot seems driven by principles of comparison and contrast. If one significant relationship becomes more distant, another gets closer; when this couple is reconciled, another falls apart; as character A becomes preoccupied with pregnancy, character B faces mortal illness; and so on.
Such patterning might run the risk of predictability, and it doesn’t always come off but, on the whole, it is one of the novel’s strengths, giving it something like the classical discipline of composition in the visual arts –- one of the subjects that Estorick’s characters are given to talk about.
An equally risky feature of About Time lies in its insistently underwritten style, as witness the brusquely functional title, the refusal to give the main characters full names, the choice to relate the tale almost entirely in dialogue, and so on. The writing seems incomplete, hasty, often lacking signposts from the narrator, leaving the reader to guess who is talking about what.
But, again, while this formal decision may irritate some, a sympathetic reading will appreciate the intense pressure that Estorick places on his own narrative by adopting this manner of storytelling, which conveys the story with as much nuance as possible but with diminishing resources, above all limited time. Perhaps the title is not as perfunctory as it looks.
About Time is not just a litératteur’s jeu d’esprit: it is well-observed, humane, and very funny. Narrowly focused on white, middle-class Englishmen with female characters’ perspectives occasionally needing more substance, it is nevertheless commendable and indeed time well spent.
Alun David is a freelance writer
