British journalist Leo Robson has written some excellent criticism for outlets such as the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, and the New Left Review (among others). Now he has written a debut novel, The Boys, set in London during the summer of 2012.
It may be strange to speak of a novel as performing functions, but that is how I read The Boys. Robson, here, assigns his novel a number of tasks: narrating a story spread across a loose family’s generations, contriving a cast of characters whose relations are nominally tenuous but affectively robust, and staging their quintessentially witty back-and-forths.
Johnny Voghel, the novel’s 30-year-old narrator, is in a state of repressed grief. Returned from an admin job at a college in the West Midlands to an empty house in Swiss Cottage inherited from his deceased parents, he mourns a lost time when he, his estranged half-brother Lawrence and the latter’s ex-partner lived together in the family home.
But the domineering and mercurial Lawrence is beckoned back to London from Chicago following news that his teenage son Jasper is expecting a child. Soon, the house in Swiss Cottage is full again with family and new friends. Lawrence, however, drifts in and out of the narrative, leaving Johnny with a choice: tracking him down to restore their relationship, or orienting his efforts towards the future by helping Jasper and his pregnant girlfriend.
By the novel’s second half, Johnny has opted for posterity. But in its accounting of the Voghels’ family history, and its depiction of a bygone London backdropped by the Olympics, The Boys luxuriates in a particular kind of north London nostalgia, decisively slotting into the traditions and tropes of a distinctly British literature.
In my imagination, Robson has read so many such novels that he has learned their mechanics inside out. This results in The Boys’ technical perfection – a unity achieved by an astute and skilful box-ticking. Robson proves a critic can produce a good novel, where “good” arises from careful stylistic choices. Readers of The Boys might find comfort in that conservatism. I myself enjoyed it as I enjoy a packet of crisps at the pub – pleasurable, and still, it left me wanting. As I finished, I wondered: mightn’t a critic – with his knowledge of what has come before – be well placed to probe what could come next?
