Dadless land
Quicksand Tales By Keggie Carew Canongate £16.99
The readers of Dadland (2016), Keggie Carew’s prize-winning first book, a tender, funny, at times eyepopping memoir of her father, were afforded occasional glimpses of Carew’s own exploits.
They included hitch-hiking in America (after she had crashed her A-levels), armed with the telephone number of the head of the CIA, a wartime friend of her father, the celebrated soldier Tom Carew; the good life in the west of Ireland; and marriage to her boyfriend of three weeks.
In this book, exploits like this take centre stage. ‘Something irresistible attracts mishap and misadventure to me,’ writes Carew.
She has a distinctive voice – droll and disarming – and a talent for ‘recycling awfulness’ to fine comic effect. She also has more than a touch of her father’s anarchic spirit. Recently married and about to set off for New Zealand, she packs up her old life in West Cork, stashing her belongings – worthless but beloved – in three tea chests, to leave in the care of a friend. Returning a year later, she discovers that the chests have been ransacked, and that the girlfriend of said friend, a woman called Diane, is brazenly walking the streets of Cork clad in cherished items of her clothing. Diane is unrepentant. There is nothing for it but for Carew to take the law into her own hands by breaking into Diane’s house and retrieving her possessions. Which she does. Except it’s the wrong house.
Some of these tales are straightforwardly unnerving – like the encounter, while camping in a northern Californian forest, with an ex-mercenary who introduces himself as ‘Animal’ and demonstrates his scalping technique on Carew. But more hinge on moments of excruciating social embarrassment (Carew exists in a semi-permanent state of mortification). At dinner in New Zealand, she sits next to someone she
believes to be ‘a hairy-faced bloke called Nigel’, only to discover that he was in fact the actor – and Carew’s hero – Sam Neill. ‘To have had the experience of sitting next to Sam Neill, yet at the same time not had it,’ she wails.
Worse is the time when she and her husband lend their cottage to a couple they know, while they attend a music festival (expensive and wet). Back home, they discover that Carew’s purse, containing £1,000 in cash, has gone missing. What to do? Say something? Say nothing? In the end, a call is made, the difficult question is asked and mortal offence is taken. And then the real culprit reveals himself.
Further discomfort arises from the transactional nature of relationships formed while travelling in Third World countries. The driver in India, with whom you spend many delightful hours, who then whisks you off to meet his family, and plies you with food and clothes, and suggests that you might be able to help his brother find a job in finance in London, and pursues you with emails on your return to England, with further requests that you might go and inspect the brother’s prospective internet bride, who lives in Portsmouth…
Other tales feel humdrum: the trials of gardening; the unhappy waitressing experience; the unfortunate piece of matchmaking; the north London storytelling workshop – humorous anecdotes that don’t quite translate onto the page. Satisfying an importunate publisher with a follow-up to an acclaimed first book, especially one starring a huge, rambunctious personality such as Tom Carew (not to mention lesser characters such as wife number two, all pursed lips and shoulder pads, a prizewinner in the ghastly stepmother stakes) is no easy task. Carew’s material here is considerably less rich and strange, and inevitably it makes for a thinner, slighter book.
In the final piece, Carew, husband and two dogs (dogs figure largely) revisit the spot in the Camargue where they’d once enjoyed ‘the best camping holiday’ they’d ever had – perfect campsite beside the perfect river, with the perfect restaurant full of charming French people and a succession of delicious things and jugs of rosé and dappled Renoir light. And miraculously everything still appears perfect, except for one crucial ingredient – the river (temporarily drained). A case of holiday disappointment that’s a bit like the experience of reading this book.
Carew is a writer with whom you’re happy to keep company, but you can’t help missing Dad.