More than just a romance … it’s a rite of passage
It hadn’t occurred to me that The Well-Tempered Clavier was a rite of passage book. I’d thought that it was a romance - a dead-solid romance. But after being contacted by Eve magazine I now appreciate that it also falls rather neatly into “coming-of-age” books. Of course it does! What an idiot not to have seen that ages ago. We have this boy, Kim, who has a certain innocence. Then the scales fall from his eyes; he gets a glimpse of his own unpleasantness; he grows up. Plain as a pike-staff when it’s pointed out to you. Anyway, to that end, and all for the greater good of The Clavier, I am writing about my four favourite rites of passage books for Eve. And obviously in there I’ll be making yet another small sales pitch for my own book too.These are the six books in my short list: Atonement - Ian McEwan.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon.The Go Between - L.P.Hartley. (”The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” Lovely.)I capture the castle - Dodie Smith.The Little Friend - Donna TarttOh - and of course Catcher in the Rye - published over 50 years ago in 1951. Read that again recently and it still stands up. What more could a novelist hope for?