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A review by arirang
Feeding Time by Adam Biles
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.