Meet Fred. He is about to turn forty and has invited an eclectic group of friends to celebrate at a rented stately home. He is a wheelchair user after being paralysed in a road traffic accident, has been busy at work at his memoir and is longing to reconnect with long-standing university crush, Heather, a high-flying TV foreign
correspondent. What should have been a jolly weekend in the country starts getting decidedly more complicated when Heather realises that the publication of Fred’s book could threaten her career ambitions.
The Ha-Ha is a thoroughly engaging and very entertaining novel about friendship, sex, hallucinogenic drugs, marriage and putting the past behind you. There is also a very hungry pig who may or may not have eaten Fred’s stolen memoir.
It also proves that you can write about disability without making a big fuss of disability and that you can pay tribute to the immortal world of Blandings without ever including a PG Wodehouse character.
Tom Shakespeare CBE is a social scientist and bioethicist, an academic who writes and talks and researches mainly about disability, but also about ethical
issues around prenatal genetic testing and end of life assisted suicide.
Born in 1966 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, he studied at Cambridge
University and has lived in Gateshead, Geneva and Norwich, while working at
Universities of Sunderland, Leeds, Newcastle, then at World Health Organisation in Geneva, afterwards at UEA Medical School, and presently as Professor of Disability Research, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Tom has presented programmes and documentaries on BBC Radio and has
written for publications including The Guardian and The Lancet, alongside talking to academic, professional and lay audiences around the world.
He has been a stand-up comedian, an actor, a dancer, and an artist. A father of
two grown-up children, he now lives in London.
My thoughts: this was a fun, and funny, read about a group of people, who mostly went to the same university years ago, gathering for their friend Fred’s fortieth. Fred is probably the nicest one of the lot, and deserves better friends and certainly a better brother. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for that.
I felt quite sorry for Fred, and not because he’s disabled (I know far too many wheelchair users) but because he’s throwing his own party and nothing goes to plan. He’s rented a beautiful old house, planned delicious meals, wants to do a bit of kayaking, maybe play Scrabble, explore the grounds, dress up for dinner in period costume and generally have a nice time.
But the rabble he’s invited instead fall out with each other, steal the manuscript of his memoir, end up in A&E, and other associated chaos. The seven year old might be the most mature one of the lot!
Luckily, as the Bard said, all’s well that ends well, and Fred makes a connection with Nel, the keeper of Vietnamese pot-bellied pig Vin Pong, who has bonded with pug Humphrey, and his friends return to their homes more or less intact. He might even have got his book back in one piece.
Realising the brothers were called Frederick and Roderick (Fred and Roddy) made me groan, but there are people out there who do that – my dad is one of 4, all with names that start with P.
The rest was however very funny, the characters were all pretty shallow but in different ways – Roddy is a wannabe MP (Labour not Tory) but a terrible person, his poor long suffering wife Charlotte (Lottie) deserved more, even if she was a bit of a snob. My favourite was the boyfriend of Robin, Fred’s old pal, Costa Rican chef Alberto, who overhears some of the book snatching plot and thinks Fred’s life is in danger, going completely crazy trying to safeguard him, all while his friends steal the manuscript.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 