nwhyte 's review for:

Starter For Ten by David Nicholls

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http://nhw.livejournal.com/805731.html[return][return]OK, the plot is pretty thin - as soon as 18-year-old Brian Jackson gets to university in October 1985, you can work out pretty rapidly that of the first two girls he meets he is going to fall in love with one, yet end up with the other. But it is told with such gusto, such humour, such toe-curling excruciating accuracy, that I actually forgot as I neared the end that I knew exactly what was going to happen.[return][return]And there are some great lines in it too. For instance:[return][return] The DJ is playing 'Tainted Love' now, and the atmosphere in the room seems to have got darker, more sexually predatory and decadent, and if it's not quite Weimar Republic Berlin, the it's at least an East Sussex Sixth-form-college production of Cabaret [return][return]Or[return][return] I walk into a university library that's almost audibly groaning with the huge weight and breadth of human knowledge, and the same two things always happen: a) I start to think about sex b) I need to go to the toilet. [return][return]But I guess what really made it for me is that Brian Jackson and I are the same age; he celebrates his nineteenth birthday in late 1985, I celebrated mine in April 1986. As jemck was writing earlier today about her feelings for Alan Bennett's 'The History Boys', that really makes it feel more like a flashback to my own life. Thank God, the details are a bit different; but I realised on the train that people were casting wary glances at the way my body was clenching in vicarious embarrassment for poor fictional Brian.[return][return]Oh yes, and it all ties in to University Challenge as well.