FREELANCE EMOTIONAL DETECTIVES & PRISONERS OF HISTORY
On Leo Robson’s ‘The Boys’, other boys, and some girls (or men and women)
What follows is an extended version of an introduction of Leo Robson I delivered a fortnight or so ago on the occasion of the South London launch of his novel The Boys, and the accompanying Soho Reading Series event, co-sponsored by God Save the Scene. Another such reading featuring Robson and special guests will be held June 13 at Big Penny Social in London, and tickets are available here.
STOKE NEWINGTON—The summer of 2012, the summer of the London Olympics, the ubiquitous yet forgettable crayon drawn logo, the invasion of runners and jumpers and players of opaque American sports, Cameron in power administering an athletic festival sired by Blair and New Labour, those blue bikes everywhere named for a mayor who wasn’t responsible for them either. It was my second summer in London, the first one when I wasn’t always solitary and mopey, the first one when I was friends with Leo Robson. I knew him as one of the city’s tyro book reviewers, a great marshaller of evidence in support of his strong opinions. So many quotations elegantly arrayed in his pieces, such attention to the technical details of narration and point of view, to the process of literary evolution and every author’s place within that tradition. Here was the most sensitive of literary prosecutors, a writer devoted to literary criticism as an empirical science, when so many of the rest of us go off our flickering reactions, off of our transitory feelings, off of the weather of reputation as it stands when we happen to open a book, or, worst of all, off of vibes. Here too was a thrower of great parties, and one of three Englishmen this American has ever been able to sit through an entire football match with, one of the others being his father, David. (The third is the novelist Luke Brown.)