What happens if you bump into a long-lost friend?
author Robert Cohen is in print with Architecture for Beginners (Hobart Books, £10.50, order through bookshops or on Amazon).
“It’s about two old schoolfriends reunited midlife – an architect in crisis and a retired footballer. Reggie, the footballer, commissions his old friend Alex to build a full-size football stadium on his country estate in Bedfordshire. It’s all downhill from there. I think it’s quite unusual, quite difficult to pigeonhole (as a book) – though maybe that’s not a big selling-point. At any rate, in the history of literature there’ve been very few novels, as far as I know, with footballers at the centre – even retired footballers – and there’ve been even fewer that straddle the worlds of both football and architecture.
“I think (people will) find it funny in many places, but hopefully affecting too. Alex and Reggie aren’t entirely admirable characters – just as well because there’s no drama in perfection. But, for all their shortcomings, they’re hopefully characters the readers will find compelling. Me and my wife Jenny recently started watching Succession, and it’s interesting to note once again – because we already knew this from Richard III and The Godfather, among others – how in the world of fiction, you can involve yourself with, if not find yourself actively rooting for, the most truly repulsive human beings. Not that Reggie and Alex are in that league, but still...
“The kernel of the thing came from an idle thought about one of my long-lost schoolfriends. It was quite a few years back, and I was spending Christmas in Eastbourne with my parents, and I drove past the onetime home of this one-time friend, and I got to wondering what this guy might be up to now. I imagined bumping into him, and a vision flashed into my brain of the two of us having a drink by a log fire in an imaginary pub. Somehow this simple image evolved into ‘Maybe there’s a play in that!’ and then ‘No, there isn’t – but a novel, maybe...’ Before I was very far down the road I’d fastened on the idea of making the two friends an architect and a footballer. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘so that’s two lots of research you’ll have to do!’ Trouble is, I do have a tendency to make a rod for my own back. When I’m in a play – I act as well as writing – I find it hard not to take on more work by volunteering to do extra tasks; more often than not it involves either programme design or help with the pubhassocks licity side of things (being a recovering journalist, I have some transferable skills), or, especially, prop-making. For instance, I was in an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and I made a roast goose for the Cratchits’ dinner scene. It was beautiful, actually, a real work of art – but it was only on stage for about a minute. But propmaking allows me to hide from more important, more tedious tasks; so, while I was making the goose, applying all these layers of papier mâché to an armature built around a milk carton, it diverted me nicely from the task of learning my lines as Bob Cratchit and Marley’s Ghost.
"Of course, the desire for diversionary activities also afflicts me in my life as a writer.”