Reviews for Twilight Time
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Simon Crump has achieved a rare thing: a novel in which every character is unspeakably repellent, but which still manages to make you care about them. This is a scabrous, filthy book, plunging the reader into the cesspit mind of Bruce Glasscock, a depressed, drugged and resentful handyman. There are shades of Pinter in the weird power dynamics, and overtones of Lucy Ellman’s furious satire, but it is shot through with an odd and affecting sympathy, a sense of pity for the blights and blasted. Parts of it made me laugh hysterically and other parts seemed so cringe-inducing that I could barely keep my eyes on the page. Simon Crump is a cult classic in the making.
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Bruce Glasscock [“they called me brittledick in the army”], the narrator of Twilight Time, is one of the most potty-mouthed characters I have ever come across – and also one the most entertaining.
Those of a sensitive disposition may not get on very well with Twilight Time: it’s littered with dog piss, the f-word and Bruce’s futile attempts to get an erection. However, the swearing is so amusing because it’s the essence of Bruce’s character: “Make mine a Pimms and put a fucking horse in it.”
There’s also something remarkably honest about the gap between his thoughts and what he says out loud, revealing his otherwise hidden insecurities. He wants to stand up to people, but often ends up bullied into submission. This is why there’s a lot more to the book than you might think; and undercurrent of despair and depression that [via plenty of shits and fucks] leads to an unexpected and thoroughly moving conclusion.
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It positively hums with loathing, lack of ambition and a very English ugliness – not Crump’s, but those of Bruce Glasscock, handyman at the Hay’s House. Bruce’s wife Linda is custodian. Bruce does the bogs, rakes the leaves, takes out the bins. He aims no higher. Variously described as “a wanker”, “a brainless twat” and “away with the fairies”, he is on medication for a unnamed condition. His only pleasures are smoking, walking the dog, and watching it piss in the warped face of a knock-off garden gnome out front.
In truth, Bruce is that gnome. Life has pissed on him, and his options for revenge are restricted to inflicting small hurts on those around him. It’s an unlovely set-up, but Crump is in total control of his material. His writing is plain, the humour a faded black, the dusting of pathos unobtrusive. By a slow, slippery magic, he makes the circumscribed world of Hay’s House, it’s employees and volunteers, a place a vital concern.
We have become used to people ransacking the mundane for it’s hidden beauty, but Crump is not in that game. If Twilight Time is tragicomic, it is tragedy and comedy of garden-gnome proportions. This is not to put it down, but to praise the delicacy and sureness of its construction.
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It’s a world that always seems to be tinted with sadness, that author Simon Crump has created in Twilight Time. Bruce appears to be the root of his own undoing, making you want to scream out loud to him to get a hold of himself. The book is also elegantly descriptive, with the cast of characters all very boldly drawn…As a piece of writing studying traits in the lives of ordinary people, it works beautifully.
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Former photographer Simon Crump took up writing because he wanted to use ideas he ‘couldn’t possibly turn into pictures’, and judging by the grimly descriptive prose in his new novel, set in a historic house, it was a very wise career move.
Hays House, an Edwardian semi in the northern town of Gateford, is a relic from a bygone age, having been left untouched since the 1930s. It’s proprietors, on the other hand, are all too representative of messy, foul-mouthed, dysfunctional modern Britain. There’s narrator and house handy man Bruce Glasscock, who, as his name just about suggests, is impotent, the result of some strong medication, a spell in the army and an emasculating wife, Lindy. Lindy is the brains of the operation and has hired Richard, an ambitious and charismatic new volunteer guide, who Bruce can’t decide whether he admires or despises.
Crump’s narrator is a character you’re unlikely to forget in a hurry. Bruce is abusive, dishonest, scheming and dismissive but, by stacking up the odds against him, Crump manages to make him likeable. He will also make you laugh out loud. ‘First woman in my life, who actually took a shine to me, ‘he says of Lindy. ‘First woman in my life I hadn’t paid for. God knows I’m paying for it now.’
As an increasingly marginalized and aggressive Bruce heads towards his preordained fate, the laughs become darker, especially in a brilliant written set-piece near the end. Twilight Time is a brief, blinkered, microcosmic novel [and all the better for it], and it makes you wonder what Crump could achieve if he widened his horizons a little.
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Simon Crump has a talent for finding poetry in the mundane, accessing the most torrid and vile of human emotions and making us laugh at them. As we watch a sad, bitter and inadequate man dither witlessly about his life fuelled by anger and hatred, we actually start to like him. His character is nasty, dark likes nothing better than the misfortune of others and he’s dishonest and yet Crump’s great achievement is to make him sympathetic. Through the extremes of human detritus and festering resentments, Crump forces us to face the foul fetid mess that exists in all of us – and laugh at it.
Twilight Time has elements of real tragicomedy – the pride a sad crumpled failure of a human being could take in buying a new toothbrush with which to clean the brass hinges of a toilet, the pathetic dehumanising crassness of that same deluded, pill-popping, impotent fifty year old as he stumbles his inebriated way through a Christmas dinner. Yes it’s cruel, it’s vicious, and it’s oh so very British – that love of scraping away the layers to reveal something rather unwholesome beneath – but it’s clever, poignant and very funny.
Crump looks his reader squarely in the face and says: ‘This is us, we are gross, miserable little worms and yet we don’t have to be completely revolting’. Crump has a uniquely honest and unflinching vision and he has the talent to tear off the veneer and revel in the insalubrious reality beneath without being gratuitous or heartless. If you have dark side, Simon Crump will let you see it – but beware, you might not like what you find.
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