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thebobsphere's review
3.0
Adam Biles Feeding Time has been one of those books that I always take with me when I go abroad and then never manage to read it but after hearing that Biles has a new novel out soon, I thought I might as well read it.
Sometimes I think that early Galley Beggars was in a strange stage. On one hand they published some experimental fiction and then occasionally they would publish a slightly less than conventional novel. Feeding Time falls into the latter.
Dorothy is moving into an old age home after sending her husband there. The problem is that when she arrives she cannot find him. At the same time she bonds with the other residents who also have their fair share of ailments.
Things are not easy for the other people who work there as well; the non committal boss of the home is suffering from an unhappy marriage and begins an affair with a younger girl. One of the co-workers has a drug habit and has a habit of visiting another inhabitant on one of the top floors and where did Leonard go?
Feeding Time is a book about the trappings of old age, especially with dementia – one of the more interesting sub plots consists of a adventure style magazine which one character reads and then tries to mimic. In the end though it’s a book about surviving.
Although I did like the plot structure and the use of illustrations, my problem with Feeding Time is a big one – I did not like the style at all. It’s in the same casual way that authors such as Paul Murray, Steve Toltz and Richard Osman write: funny conversational. Personally this grates and it was a bit of an effort to finish the book.
To date I’ve never been disappointed by a Galley beggar book as their standards are high but sadly, I didn’t get along with this one.
Sometimes I think that early Galley Beggars was in a strange stage. On one hand they published some experimental fiction and then occasionally they would publish a slightly less than conventional novel. Feeding Time falls into the latter.
Dorothy is moving into an old age home after sending her husband there. The problem is that when she arrives she cannot find him. At the same time she bonds with the other residents who also have their fair share of ailments.
Things are not easy for the other people who work there as well; the non committal boss of the home is suffering from an unhappy marriage and begins an affair with a younger girl. One of the co-workers has a drug habit and has a habit of visiting another inhabitant on one of the top floors and where did Leonard go?
Feeding Time is a book about the trappings of old age, especially with dementia – one of the more interesting sub plots consists of a adventure style magazine which one character reads and then tries to mimic. In the end though it’s a book about surviving.
Although I did like the plot structure and the use of illustrations, my problem with Feeding Time is a big one – I did not like the style at all. It’s in the same casual way that authors such as Paul Murray, Steve Toltz and Richard Osman write: funny conversational. Personally this grates and it was a bit of an effort to finish the book.
To date I’ve never been disappointed by a Galley beggar book as their standards are high but sadly, I didn’t get along with this one.
micrummey's review
1.0
It tells you a lot when you have to read reviews on goodreads to understand what was going on in this novel, set in a care home.
All the characters seemed to merge into one voice and it was difficult to distinguish between those in care and their carers. There is one exception to this and that was the manager Cornish who has an unsavoury attraction towards a fifteen year old girl.
There are some smutty puns in the book, the title of the comic within the book 'Air Souls' being one of them.
For these puns to work you need to be a much more clever writer than Biles. I felt at times his narrative read like a stream of words pouring out from his pen (or PC) and not taking the time to edit at a later date.
For instance between Page 72 to 74 five sentences begin with Then, it was grating.
On editing I found it frustrating certain words were blocked out and I am trying to work out why especially at one point some pages only had four or five words to the page,
I found it very hard to find something positive about the book with the possible exception of the artwork of 'Air Souls', to sum this book up, a pile of bile.
All the characters seemed to merge into one voice and it was difficult to distinguish between those in care and their carers. There is one exception to this and that was the manager Cornish who has an unsavoury attraction towards a fifteen year old girl.
There are some smutty puns in the book, the title of the comic within the book 'Air Souls' being one of them.
For these puns to work you need to be a much more clever writer than Biles. I felt at times his narrative read like a stream of words pouring out from his pen (or PC) and not taking the time to edit at a later date.
For instance between Page 72 to 74 five sentences begin with Then, it was grating.
On editing I found it frustrating certain words were blocked out and I am trying to work out why especially at one point some pages only had four or five words to the page,
I found it very hard to find something positive about the book with the possible exception of the artwork of 'Air Souls', to sum this book up, a pile of bile.
shimmer's review
Feeding Time begins with a woman’s arrival at her new residence in an eldercare home, but from there it goes off in all kinds of thrilling, thoughtful directions. It’s a novel about aging, but it’s also a novel of resistance — resisting the ravages of senescence, and senility, and the indignities of being treated as irrelevant by those paid to care for you and those you cared for as your own children. And that resistance takes on literal form as the residents of an utterly cruel, miserable, mismanaged home revolt against the institution in increasingly high-stakes, dramatic, often hilarious ways. Led by “The Captain,” an inmate whose rambunctious military bearing refuses to to be cowed, the residents seek to reclaim their dignity and identities in the face of institutional forces determined to reduce them, and among the many layers of that conflict I especially enjoyed the seriousness with which fantasy (even comic fantasy) is treated by Biles — his characters, the elders but also the incompetent “CareFriends” paid to mind them and the useless manager of the facility, all struggle between what their life is and what they think it should be. They resist or fail to resist bad marriages, a lack of prospects for getting ahead, and the realization of what they’ve become, so rather than the elders in their declining bodies being the most “decayed” among the cast there’s a reversal. The elders are active, with genuine agency and self-determination, as they try to reclaim identities they’ve been stripped of by so many forces from time to bureaucracy.
As the characters, old and young alike, struggle to hang onto themselves and, crucially, the fantasies that have allowed them to get on with life and endure, the novel incorporates adventure stories written in Boy’s Own fashion. Fantasy, and the fantastic, move deeper and deeper into the heart of the novel as it develops, though I don’t want to say more and risk spoiling it. Ultimately what I found really impressive and rewarding — not to mention great fun — was Bile’s success at giving dignity to his characters and their grim circumstances while balancing it with elements that could have so easily become awkward or clunky.
As the characters, old and young alike, struggle to hang onto themselves and, crucially, the fantasies that have allowed them to get on with life and endure, the novel incorporates adventure stories written in Boy’s Own fashion. Fantasy, and the fantastic, move deeper and deeper into the heart of the novel as it develops, though I don’t want to say more and risk spoiling it. Ultimately what I found really impressive and rewarding — not to mention great fun — was Bile’s success at giving dignity to his characters and their grim circumstances while balancing it with elements that could have so easily become awkward or clunky.
arirang's review
3.0
Feeding Time is another excellent novel from the independent Galley Beggar Press, publishers of [b:A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing|18218630|A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing|Eimear McBride|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1374386236s/18218630.jpg|25647879], [b:Forbidden Line|30256606|Forbidden Line|Paul Stanbridge|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1464002528s/30256606.jpg|50728464], [b:We That Are Young|28800253|We That Are Young|Preti Taneja|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497714658s/28800253.jpg|49012104] and [b:Playthings|26201833|Playthings|Alex Pheby|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443823182s/26201833.jpg|46179078], one that per [a:Joanna Walsh|1170319|Joanna Walsh|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1451468214p2/1170319.jpg], one of the judges, only narrowly missed out on the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist.
The author Adam Biles is events director at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, possibly my favourite bookshop ever (see http://adambiles.net/audiovisual/ for him talking about his own book at the shop) and this is his debut novel.
One of my favourite novels of the last 12 months was Margaret Drabble's The Dark Flood Rises, which tackled the subject of ageing and old-age care.
Biles's novel tackles a similar subject but with a very different style and tone - scatological and slapstick humour at times. And whereas Drabble's characters were in expensive sheltered housing with their cultural stimulation, Biles's care homes are, by his own admission, inspired more by prison camps.
Dot is a retired teacher of English literature, "the kind of teacher only appreciated years down the line when a safe distance had been established and maintained."
After her husband, Leonard, suffering from dementia, has to be committed into care, she decides to sell her house and enter the same care home, Green Oaks herself.
But there she immediately encounters a disorientating setting (where even is Leonard?) and a weird range of characters amongst her fellow residents:
What wasn't odd around here? It was as if Dot had walked into a clunky Dickensian archetypes. Windsor? Lanyard? Smithy? As much as she disliked herself for it, she'd already found their pigeonholes: Windsor was the Faux-Aristo-John-Bull, Lanyard the Tuppenny-Ha'penny-Bureaucrat and Smithy the Broken-Spirit-Out-to-Pasture. As for Olive, she was an extraneous character, no doubt about it, thrown into the mix to hammer home a point about something or other, at some time or other, but with little direct impact on the narrative. She was having more trouble with Betty, although give her time ... she'd nail her as well.
The staff are equally odd. The disreputable director Raymond Cornish is seldom seen and spends most of the novel drawing obscene pictures of the patients, and grooming a 15 year-old girl while counting the days till her 16th birthday.
And the staff, "CareFriends", consist of three youngsters, addicted to the drugs intended for those under their care. Their 'care' regime revolves around disorientation techniques - sedating "the Greys" into submission, all clocks are removed or the times set wrong, and personal watches confiscated so they have no sense of time, even the board games and jigsaws have pieces purposely removed. Even the names of the patients prove to have been given to them by the CareFriends so as to remove their BGO (before Green Oaks) identity and turn them into the caricatures Dot recognises.
Rehearsing a conversation with a potential complaining relative, one CareFriend announces he would respond:
Newsflash! - you don't get a say into what happens to your garbage after you throw it out!
The most memorable of all Dot's fellows is Captain Dylan Ruggles (actually a retired administrator), convinced that the care home is actually a German POW camp in the second world war and he a war hero, constantly plotting his escape plans. However Dot thinks:
The only border he risked crossing was the one-way frontier into the Kingdom of the Doolally.
Parts of the novel are told from Ruggles's perspective but in the style of a war comic - 'Air Souls' (pun intended by the author) - complete with cartoons and amusing adverts for laxatives and false teeth. Ruggles also channels Don Quixote (a nod to Biles' stablemate [a:Paul Stanbridge|15274777|Paul Stanbridge|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]?) in his delusions.
Institutionalisation is a crucial theme for Biles - of both guards/wardens and prisoners/patients - and Dot finds herself oddly accepting of the situation and regime, even of the fact that her husband Leonard isn't in the same ward and she has no idea where he is.
In that sense, the delusional Ruggles is, in one sense, the most grounded of the characters, as the one person 'raging against the dying of the light' (his name Dylan is, as as the novel itself acknowledges, a deliberate nod to Dylan Thomas) and he eventually leads the residents in a rebellion against the CareFriends, their true characters also emerging more from the caricatures created by their carers.
They temporarily create their own benign regime, even finding the seemingly ruined games are perfect for the 'premies' (a ward of those suffering from dementia - including, Dot eventually finds, Leonard):
The fact that they were incomplete, unplayable, didn't seem to matter. The haphazardness of the games seemed to gel perfectly with the haphazardness of their minds. The Jack of Hearts overtook Colonel Mustard to pass Go and collect several jigsaw pieces for his trouble. Why in the end, shouldn't that make sense.
But at the novel's end theGermans CareFriends return with support from troops their mates, to attempt to retake the camp care-home.
"Exposition, complication, climax, resolution" was Dot's constant mantra to her students as a teacher, but she ponders that movies seldom worry about the aftermath of the resolution, and that the same applies to people's lives:
How much more the syringe suited the Reaper than the scythe. The scythe was swift, clean, almost merciful. But he scythed so rarely these days. Now he preferred the slow torture of Parkinson's, of senility, of the crab. These afflictions allowed the spirit to attend its own harvesting, to watch the vessel wither on the vine, to contemplate the void, to remain present, conscious, down to the very last-drop of soul-marrow. Nobody escaped it.
A solid 4 stars - recommended.
Thanks to Galley Beggar Press for the ARC.
The author Adam Biles is events director at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, possibly my favourite bookshop ever (see http://adambiles.net/audiovisual/ for him talking about his own book at the shop) and this is his debut novel.
One of my favourite novels of the last 12 months was Margaret Drabble's The Dark Flood Rises, which tackled the subject of ageing and old-age care.
Biles's novel tackles a similar subject but with a very different style and tone - scatological and slapstick humour at times. And whereas Drabble's characters were in expensive sheltered housing with their cultural stimulation, Biles's care homes are, by his own admission, inspired more by prison camps.
Dot is a retired teacher of English literature, "the kind of teacher only appreciated years down the line when a safe distance had been established and maintained."
After her husband, Leonard, suffering from dementia, has to be committed into care, she decides to sell her house and enter the same care home, Green Oaks herself.
But there she immediately encounters a disorientating setting (where even is Leonard?) and a weird range of characters amongst her fellow residents:
What wasn't odd around here? It was as if Dot had walked into a clunky Dickensian archetypes. Windsor? Lanyard? Smithy? As much as she disliked herself for it, she'd already found their pigeonholes: Windsor was the Faux-Aristo-John-Bull, Lanyard the Tuppenny-Ha'penny-Bureaucrat and Smithy the Broken-Spirit-Out-to-Pasture. As for Olive, she was an extraneous character, no doubt about it, thrown into the mix to hammer home a point about something or other, at some time or other, but with little direct impact on the narrative. She was having more trouble with Betty, although give her time ... she'd nail her as well.
The staff are equally odd. The disreputable director Raymond Cornish is seldom seen and spends most of the novel drawing obscene pictures of the patients, and grooming a 15 year-old girl while counting the days till her 16th birthday.
And the staff, "CareFriends", consist of three youngsters, addicted to the drugs intended for those under their care. Their 'care' regime revolves around disorientation techniques - sedating "the Greys" into submission, all clocks are removed or the times set wrong, and personal watches confiscated so they have no sense of time, even the board games and jigsaws have pieces purposely removed. Even the names of the patients prove to have been given to them by the CareFriends so as to remove their BGO (before Green Oaks) identity and turn them into the caricatures Dot recognises.
Rehearsing a conversation with a potential complaining relative, one CareFriend announces he would respond:
Newsflash! - you don't get a say into what happens to your garbage after you throw it out!
The most memorable of all Dot's fellows is Captain Dylan Ruggles (actually a retired administrator), convinced that the care home is actually a German POW camp in the second world war and he a war hero, constantly plotting his escape plans. However Dot thinks:
The only border he risked crossing was the one-way frontier into the Kingdom of the Doolally.
Parts of the novel are told from Ruggles's perspective but in the style of a war comic - 'Air Souls' (pun intended by the author) - complete with cartoons and amusing adverts for laxatives and false teeth. Ruggles also channels Don Quixote (a nod to Biles' stablemate [a:Paul Stanbridge|15274777|Paul Stanbridge|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]?) in his delusions.
Institutionalisation is a crucial theme for Biles - of both guards/wardens and prisoners/patients - and Dot finds herself oddly accepting of the situation and regime, even of the fact that her husband Leonard isn't in the same ward and she has no idea where he is.
In that sense, the delusional Ruggles is, in one sense, the most grounded of the characters, as the one person 'raging against the dying of the light' (his name Dylan is, as as the novel itself acknowledges, a deliberate nod to Dylan Thomas) and he eventually leads the residents in a rebellion against the CareFriends, their true characters also emerging more from the caricatures created by their carers.
They temporarily create their own benign regime, even finding the seemingly ruined games are perfect for the 'premies' (a ward of those suffering from dementia - including, Dot eventually finds, Leonard):
The fact that they were incomplete, unplayable, didn't seem to matter. The haphazardness of the games seemed to gel perfectly with the haphazardness of their minds. The Jack of Hearts overtook Colonel Mustard to pass Go and collect several jigsaw pieces for his trouble. Why in the end, shouldn't that make sense.
But at the novel's end the
"Exposition, complication, climax, resolution" was Dot's constant mantra to her students as a teacher, but she ponders that movies seldom worry about the aftermath of the resolution, and that the same applies to people's lives:
How much more the syringe suited the Reaper than the scythe. The scythe was swift, clean, almost merciful. But he scythed so rarely these days. Now he preferred the slow torture of Parkinson's, of senility, of the crab. These afflictions allowed the spirit to attend its own harvesting, to watch the vessel wither on the vine, to contemplate the void, to remain present, conscious, down to the very last-drop of soul-marrow. Nobody escaped it.
A solid 4 stars - recommended.
Thanks to Galley Beggar Press for the ARC.
jackielaw's review
5.0
Feeding Time, by Adam Biles, is set in an old people’s care home, Green Oaks. Established in an old manor house, it is now owned by a conglomerate whose aim is to maximise profit. It is a place where the elderly and infirm who can no longer cope on their own go to die. The story is laced with humour but also the horror of such places. It portrays the residents with honesty and dignity, despite the many indignities that old age brings.
The reader is first introduced to Dot as she leaves the bungalow in which she and her husband had lived for the past twenty years. She has chosen to join him at Green Oaks where she moved him six weeks ago. Their only son is settled abroad with his own small family. He is dutiful, ringing her regularly for reassurance that all is well. Dot understands that institutions such as Green Oaks exist for the young as much as the old, lifting as they do the burden of care.
It does not take long for Dot to realise that life in this place will be nothing like the impression she was given when she applied to move in. The three wards are communal and staff are few. She is confused when her husband is not on the ward to which she has been assigned. Her fellow residents have multiple, age related health issues which they present to her with something akin to pride.
Dot meets Captain Ruggles who experiences life in the style of a weekly Story Paper from around the war. Each episode is presented to the reader complete with illustrations and advertisements (these are priceless!). His grasp on the reality that others see is tenuous. He believes that he is a prisoner of the Nazis having been accidently parachuted into this camp. He is eager to recruit his fellow inmates and orchestrate their escape.
Green Oaks is run by Raymond Cornish who finds the residents repellent and avoids them. Nursing needs have been outsourced so he now has just three staff to deal with day to day tasks. These young, underpaid Carefriends pilfer drugs from supplies and mitigate their boredom and personal frustrations with petty cruelties enacted against the elderly who they despise. When Captain Ruggles’ loud and lively behaviour disrupts their routine they seek to transfer him to the mythically feared Ward C that he may be chemically shut down.
There is a missing resident, Kalka, whose bed was given to Dot. He may be dead or simply moved elsewhere. The Captain remembers this man saving his life and wishes to return the favour. Discussion about his possible whereabouts, indeed about most things, is a struggle as few of the residents seem capable of retaining a train of thought. They take their drugs then sit in the day room or sleep, leaking effluence and odours while the staff concentrate on their own sorry lives.
There is no shying from the messy issues brought on by advancing age, yet each of the residents is presented as the person they still are inside their decaying shell. The Captain is a fabulous character, completely batty but living a life which in his own mind is real. It is a surprisingly uplifting portrayal of dementia.
The manner in which residents are treated by staff is grim, as is the behaviour of Cornish. What sets this book apart though is its spirit and style. There is a muted energy behind each of the characters despite their infirmities. Mind and bodily functions may have been loosened but there are still moments of perspicacity as they rage against the hand that life has dealt.
While there is still this hold on life there are adventures to be had, battles to be fought, especially against those who regard the elderly as a problem to be managed and silenced. As the staff slip further into mires of their own making, the old seek to enact their cunning plans.
This is a rare and imaginative tale filled with wit, verve and derring-do, as well as leaky, ravaged bodies. It is a story of people and life, strikingly original, brilliantly written and ingeniously presented. I recommend you order this book direct from the publisher now.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Galley Beggar Press.
The reader is first introduced to Dot as she leaves the bungalow in which she and her husband had lived for the past twenty years. She has chosen to join him at Green Oaks where she moved him six weeks ago. Their only son is settled abroad with his own small family. He is dutiful, ringing her regularly for reassurance that all is well. Dot understands that institutions such as Green Oaks exist for the young as much as the old, lifting as they do the burden of care.
It does not take long for Dot to realise that life in this place will be nothing like the impression she was given when she applied to move in. The three wards are communal and staff are few. She is confused when her husband is not on the ward to which she has been assigned. Her fellow residents have multiple, age related health issues which they present to her with something akin to pride.
Dot meets Captain Ruggles who experiences life in the style of a weekly Story Paper from around the war. Each episode is presented to the reader complete with illustrations and advertisements (these are priceless!). His grasp on the reality that others see is tenuous. He believes that he is a prisoner of the Nazis having been accidently parachuted into this camp. He is eager to recruit his fellow inmates and orchestrate their escape.
Green Oaks is run by Raymond Cornish who finds the residents repellent and avoids them. Nursing needs have been outsourced so he now has just three staff to deal with day to day tasks. These young, underpaid Carefriends pilfer drugs from supplies and mitigate their boredom and personal frustrations with petty cruelties enacted against the elderly who they despise. When Captain Ruggles’ loud and lively behaviour disrupts their routine they seek to transfer him to the mythically feared Ward C that he may be chemically shut down.
There is a missing resident, Kalka, whose bed was given to Dot. He may be dead or simply moved elsewhere. The Captain remembers this man saving his life and wishes to return the favour. Discussion about his possible whereabouts, indeed about most things, is a struggle as few of the residents seem capable of retaining a train of thought. They take their drugs then sit in the day room or sleep, leaking effluence and odours while the staff concentrate on their own sorry lives.
There is no shying from the messy issues brought on by advancing age, yet each of the residents is presented as the person they still are inside their decaying shell. The Captain is a fabulous character, completely batty but living a life which in his own mind is real. It is a surprisingly uplifting portrayal of dementia.
The manner in which residents are treated by staff is grim, as is the behaviour of Cornish. What sets this book apart though is its spirit and style. There is a muted energy behind each of the characters despite their infirmities. Mind and bodily functions may have been loosened but there are still moments of perspicacity as they rage against the hand that life has dealt.
While there is still this hold on life there are adventures to be had, battles to be fought, especially against those who regard the elderly as a problem to be managed and silenced. As the staff slip further into mires of their own making, the old seek to enact their cunning plans.
This is a rare and imaginative tale filled with wit, verve and derring-do, as well as leaky, ravaged bodies. It is a story of people and life, strikingly original, brilliantly written and ingeniously presented. I recommend you order this book direct from the publisher now.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Galley Beggar Press.
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