The Young Accomplice

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Its evocation of an ostensibly decorous postwar world full ofcontradictions is convincing throughout. It sometimes steers away from moments of potential turmoil to focus on what the characters are thinking. He has earned comparisons to Donna Tartt and John Fowles, but when it comes to literary prizes he is often the shortlistee and rarely the winner. Set in the 1950s, with flashbacks to the 30s, two young siblings get the chance to join an architect couple as accomplices in the English country.

Through dramatic time jumps and a sure ear for dialogue, Wood builds up convincing levels of psychological depth in all the main characters. Wood is also wonderful on the intricacies of love and architecture as a means of enriching people’s lives. It is a choice that leads to a period in borstal for her and her younger brother, Charlie, developing into a story of opportunity, education and escaping the past. I enjoyed this book about various ups and downs in the lives of Arthur and Flo and ex-Borstal siblings, Joyce and Charlie who they allow to live with them on their farm/architectural practice based on the ideals of Frank Lloyd Wright. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs.Enter Joyce and Charlie Savigear – siblings in their late teens – who win the Mayhoods’ drawing competition for borstal kids with an eye for design. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel. Like Wood’s previous novel, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, it concerns malign or misguided father figures, and the necessity of learning from mistakes. Benjamin Wood’s fourth novel is a reflective tale that seems only mildly tense when compared to the harrowing drama of A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better.

Though the momentum is sometimes interrupted by passages describing characters’ pasts, the reading experience is nonetheless enjoyable. While Joyce (the elder of the two) is rather sly and outspoken, Charlie is much quieter – a diligent young man who seems eager to learn.Wood’s natural observational style (Arthur’s realisation, as he looks at a man in the pub, that “every filling in that mouth — and likely everybody else’s in the building — had a faint connection to his wife”, whose father was a dentist, is one example), combined with his sensibility for the vocabulary and syntax of the time (the prose never feels stilted) make The Young Accomplice a well-wrought novel whose pleasure is in each careful scene, moment and sentence. Goodreads app swallowed my almost finished review today, I’ll have a rest and see if I can muster up the strength to redo it.

W]hen she’d made the plans to renovate her bedroom, back in August, she hadn’t known what would be needed. The title refers to Joyce: in time it becomes clear that she's still up to the sort of mischief that put her into a youth detention centre in the first place, in thrall to an older man whose threats if she doesn't cooperate are all too believable. They live and work together on the Surrey farm where the Mayhoods’ idealistic practice is based: tilling lessons in the morning; draughting classes in the afternoon.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

This year I very much enjoyed Benjamin Wood's highly accomplished The Young Accomplice,a novel which convincingly recreates the 1950s milieu of an architect's utopian dream on a farm in England .He had the same involuntary pout, the same relentless motion to his eyes, as though observant of particulars that only he could see. Wood convincingly outlines the slowly curdling process of being groomed: Joyce is picked up young, and at first there are ice-creams, day trips and a flat of her own, but then there are indebtedness, impositions, threats and violence. The architects who've chosen them are Florence and Arthur Mayhood, a married couple motivated to give young offenders second chances. I enjoyed the cameos from Frank Lloyd Wright and the idea of a chain of architectural apprenticeship.