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DRIVING IN THE DARK (Arrow £5.99)
This is the novel that, as I said, grew out of a short
story. In fact, even more deliciously, I later extracted a
character from it (Shirley) and gave her a story of her own
(it appears in a later collection, “Changing Babies”)..
The storl is narrated by a man, a coach driver called Desmond.
It really describes a long nervous breakdown as he drives
through Britain, searching for a son he’s never seen,
the result of a liaison long ago. I write a great deal about
lost children – lost through divorce, kidnapping, abduction,
incest. It’s also a voyage through various hinterlands
of modern life – a caravan park in Spalding, a house,
condemned for demolition, in a backstreet of Reading. I like
people who are washed up, who live on the edge. Like Heather
in “Porky”, this man seems to be carrying on life
without me; I’ve thought about him a great deal in the
intervening years (this novel was written in 1988). I’m
very fond of poor bewildered Desmond, who is trying to understand
women. I suppose it’s a sort of road movie, a dark night
of the soul. And it speaks up for the eighties’ forgotten
gender: men.
Desmond never did have much luck with women – except
getting them through their driving tests. Now a coach driver,
he is at the most crucial crossroads of his life. His wife
has thrown him out. The crisis serves only to deepen his despair
over another failed liaison – until he elects to steer
his coach on a spectacularly reckless quest for the son he
has never seen.
“Disturbing and witty…a deftly-described odyssey
that places the battle of the sexes in a new arena.”
(Sunday Times)
“Moggach, for the purposes of the book, has turned
herself into a bloke. His monologue throughout strikes me
as totally authentic, but not only does Moggach get his lingo
right, she thinks through his head, dramatizing his confusion,
decency, wit, pain and determination. This is not just ventriloquism,
but empathy so complete as to be phenomenal.”
(Irish Times)
“At once acutely funny and sad…a woman’s
protest at the inequality thrust on men by the worse excesses
of the women’s movement.”
(Mail on Sunday)
“Poignant and funny…Deborah Moggach is brilliant
at capturing just the right voice for her characters.”
(Cosmopolitan)
256 pages (7 December, 1989)
Publisher: Penguin Books; ISBN: 0140112448
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