The Bookie's Runner
Bob Dylan wrote the classic song Knockin' on Heaven's Door and thereby unforgettably marked the passing of an otherwise insignificant character in the movie Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.
Brendan Gisby has written this utterly beautiful novella to honour the short life of his father, a man of seemingly as little significance.
The story is narrated with haunting subtlety, rhythm and depth of feeling by his teenage son as he takes a bus ride back to school for the first day of a new term where he will have to announce his father's sudden death and deal with the resultant reactions without bursting into tears. He also has to come to terms with the fact that, on reflection, there is a huge amount he doesn't know about his father and that all he is really left with are snippets of personal memories.
Make no mistake, The Bookie's Runner is a modern masterpiece and, in writing it, Brendan Gisby has not only honoured his father, he has ennobled him.
Brendan Gisby has written this utterly beautiful novella to honour the short life of his father, a man of seemingly as little significance.
The story is narrated with haunting subtlety, rhythm and depth of feeling by his teenage son as he takes a bus ride back to school for the first day of a new term where he will have to announce his father's sudden death and deal with the resultant reactions without bursting into tears. He also has to come to terms with the fact that, on reflection, there is a huge amount he doesn't know about his father and that all he is really left with are snippets of personal memories.
Make no mistake, The Bookie's Runner is a modern masterpiece and, in writing it, Brendan Gisby has not only honoured his father, he has ennobled him.
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Reviews |
Tim Roux, Publisher and Author (UK)Brendan Gisby's The Bookie's Runner is a perfect 100 pages - perfect and exactly 100 pages (you don't see that too often).
So, it is a novella, and a eulogy, maybe even an apology for Brendan's not being able to do more to help his father in troubled times, although he clearly did what he could. There is nothing extraordinary about the story of this book - millions, even billions, have suffered lives like these, which makes it a universal tale. What is extraordinary is the writing. Like the best of French auteur cinema, it is novella of characters who interact vividly (you can see each one clearly as if on celluloid) in a mildly tragic way. The tone is lyrical, fluorescent, and its trajectory is literally the dying fall. We know from the beginning that it is about a man who will be dead by the end of the book. The question is why. There is also something extraordinary about the plotting and the rhythm of the piece, something that mesmerises. The whole book takes place in the space of a short bus journey the author took as a teenager after the funeral of his father on his way to his first day back at school. It has been compared with Angela's Ashes but it is not as grandstanding as that. It is more like Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse or Elizabeth Smart's I Sat Down in Grand Central Station and Wept. It is too late to read this before Brendan's dad died and to put things right, and that would somewhat undermine the point of the book, but there is time yet to read it before you do. Yes, it is one of those books for sure. George Polley, Author (Japan)What his publisher says about The Bookie's Runner: it is "thoroughly mesmerising." I agree. It is also a gem, the kind of story that once picked up, resists being put down until the last syllable of the last word of the last sentence has been read.
Written from the perspective of a fifteen year old boy thinking through his father's life and death, this book of 100 pages tells the story of "an ordinary, working-class man; a gentle soul, who loved his family and toiled day and night for them," "a downtrodden man, one of life's losers", a man of many dreams who wanted so much more from life, but ended achieving nothing but the respect and love of those who knew him which, in my experience, is worth more than money can possibly buy. One might think that such a description is enough to cause people to turn away from this book and its story ... yet it is what makes the story so compelling. We all know people like Derry McKay, common, ordinary blokes who may be of little account in the grand scheme of things, but whose lives are the foundation on which our countries and our civilizations stand. Derry McKay's story hauntingly lingers, appearing in the memories and associations from the years of my living, as it will in yours. Pick up a copy of this captivating story, sit down, get a cup of coffee or tea, put your feet up and enjoy The Bookie's Runner. It's one of my favorites in this New Year. Soooz Burke, Author (Australia)We all would like to think that at some stage after our departure from the living world, someone, somewhere, would care enough to remember us, with fondness.
Brendan Gisby does that in this book. Yet more importantly he allows us to invade the life of his late father, Derry McKay. The author takes us by the hand and joins us in the journey into who Derry McKay was, and what impact his life had on those that knew him. The author writes with a pen filled with love, regret, and at times anger at what can never be changed. This is not an account glowing with metaphors about the late Derry McKay. It is far too honest for that. What the author has achieved here is a lingering visual image of a man who seemed too gentle for the time he was born into. A gentleman and a gentle man, Derry McKay was quick with a smile and quicker still to help anyone in need. He was a man who clearly adored his family, and worked long and hard to ensure them a safe and secure place in a difficult world. Some people are larger than life, they strut about, garnering attention, drawing people to them by the sheer force of their personalities. These peacocks are memorable for reasons very different to those of the Author's father. Derry McKay was a man who never forgot how to dream. He clung to the belief that one day ... someday his ship would come in. He held that belief right up until the end of his life. He held himself together in spite of the circumstances and the people around him that took those precious dreams and tried to trash them. He bent under the strain of providing for his large brood. He turned gray and took on more work load in a vain attempt to make his family a little safer, a little more secure in an insecure world. The very people he should have been able to trust with his fragile hopes and dreams, and his hard earned money, were so certain of his ultimate forgiveness that they made the continuing mistake of seeing him as weak. Calm acceptance of what life hands out is not a weakness. It takes strength and wisdom to hold on to what you believe to be the right thing to do, when the easier thing would be to run. Many men would have walked away from the poverty and the stress associated with it. Many men would have had their spirit broken by the process of dehumanizing that often accompany being poor. Derry McKay didn't walk...he didn't break, although he came painfully close to it. In staying, in continuing to work when his health deteriorated, in refusing to acknowledge that his illness was more than a painful problem that would heal with time; Derry McKay signed his own death certificate. By virtue of the fact that he existed at all, the fact that I have just shared a patchwork of glimpses into his life, Derry McKay will always remain remembered. His life mattered. He counted for something. His son has proven just that in writing this book. The Author's reaction, loss, pride and anger in recounting his memories of Derry McKay make for a powerful read. Take the journey with Brendan Gisby. Meet, Derry Mckay. The man, the husband, the father, the son and the grandson...The Bookie's Runner. You will not regret it. It is not a long journey...but the Author makes it a very memorable one. Bill Kirton, Author (UK)Revisiting the past in order to learn its lessons is a familiar theme. In this book, the author’s explicit about his aim. He’s recreating a single bus ride to his school after the holidays, the ride which will take him to his first day in fourth year. And there, he’ll have to smile and laugh and be ‘normal’ even though his dad has just died. In the course of the ride, he recalls memories and puts them together to capture his dad’s essence, to try to find out who he was and, in the process, make the same discovery about himself.
So we have a mature writer ‘regressing’ to his early teenage self, who becomes the narrator. The bus journey is lived in the present tense, with him dredging up and mixing the memories to give the life he’s lived thus far a shape, putting people in their places in the story, ascribing blame, seeing patterns. Above all, he’s resurrecting his dad and at the same time forcing himself, more or less successfully, not to cry. The Bookie's Runner is a short book but it has a compelling density that anchors it in those seemingly insignificant little details of which reality is made. Most of the memories about his dad begin with a gesture, a few words spoken, a look. Each then opens out into an episode which encapsulates one or more of the characteristics which define the man for him. The time and the setting are carefully recreated, but without artifice, and the reader’s drawn into the narrative by the occasional image that’s recalled then shaken off without being explained for fear that it’ll make the tears start flowing. There’s the sight of his dad ‘sliding down the living room door and dissolving into tears’ or splashing in the sea wearing blue knickers or lying grey-faced in the hospital bed. They’re all explained in the course of the narrative but, when they’re first mentioned, they simply intrigue, tease and draw you onwards. Then there are the strangely vituperative moments when he rails against his mother for borrowing more and more to keep up appearances. ‘Sure, mum, we had an immaculate house and proper school uniforms and nice clothes to wear in the chapter on Sunday but didn’t you realise that we couldn’t afford those things? Didn’t it occur to you that we didn’t really need them? Didn’t it dawn on you that the clothes and the furniture and carpets were all bought on tick and would have to be paid for one day?’ And there’s also ‘the unspoken business of mum carrying on with other men’. It underlines an irony the author noted earlier when he wrote that his parents’ marriage was ‘a match made in heaven. Theirs will be a fairy-tale marriage. They’ll produce beautiful children and live happily ever after. Aye, if only…’ And yet, if this is giving the impression that this is yet another ‘misery memoir’, that’s false. Because there’s life here, and laughs. OK, working class life for a couple with six kids to raise was hard, but there’s a strength in their community that isn’t found so easily in our more sheltered society. And, despite seeing how badly his dad was treated, how people, including his wife, took advantage of his gentleness, his trust, the man’s personality is strong and he found pleasures in his life. This was the meek, gentle man who, when bullied by a Petty Officer, poured a pot of soup over him. As the bus nears the narrator’s school, the tears come at last, provoked by incidents in his dad’s final days. It’s the book’s climax and it centres around his death and two specific events related to it which seem to sum up the man. I don’t intend this to be a spoiler so one of them you’ll have to read for yourself. The narrator tells us he wept ‘Tears devoid of bitterness. Tears of sorrow. The sorrow not for me, but for the man who had never won; the man who was destined to lose. They robbed him before he died, and they robbed him after he died.’ But then, as this ‘loser’ is carried to the cemetery for burial, ‘suddenly they’re there: hundreds upon hundreds of mourners, lining both sides of the road, cramming the little lane that leads up to the cemetery gates, filling the cemetery itself. It’s as if the whole town has come to say goodbye to dad. It’s a measure of the love that people have for him – for their Derry McKay, for a son of the Ferry. And there’s another way the father has quietly won the battle, too. The narrator’s final claim is that he’s learned from his father’s story that ‘I’ll be happy to forego the multitude at my graveside and my heavenly reward in order to live a better life than yours […] I won’t ever be gentle and trusting. I’ve learned from your errors.’ And yet the narrative is threaded through with tenderness, empathy, an affective sensitivity and that tendency to tears. They do all suggest that, after all, he’s his father’s son. Tiffany Harkleroad, Reviewer (USA)As he returns to school for the new term, the narrator (the author) looks back over the life of his recently deceased father. Never a famous, wealthy, or overly successful man, his father was a good man nonetheless. Different aspects of his father's life are discussed, anecdotes and personal histories. The narrator's stories serve to eulogize his father, as he prepares to share his loss with the world.
This book is nothing short of gorgeous. I have said it before, I love stories about real people, and this novella is certainly that. The book flowed so well, it was more like a conversation with the author than a book. It felt as though we were sitting at a wake, remembering the best times in the life of a man, a father, a husband. This may be one of the most poignant books I have ever read. I love that we really feel the emotion in the storytelling. Several times, the narrator/author interjects his attempts to keep from weeping. I would have to try to keep myself from weeping as well. So much beauty in a story of an everyday life. This book is a great fit for anyone who loves memoirs or autobiographies. It is a nice short read, but it packs a walloping emotional punch. Read it, and keep the tissues handy. |