Pillow Man, by Nick Coleman - Book review: Dry wit and pithy characterisation

JONATHAN CAPE - £16.99

Nick Coleman’s moving 2012 memoir of his hearing loss and tinnitus in one ear outlined the importance of music in his life. The former Music Editor of Time Out and Arts and Features Editor at The Independent and Independent on Sunday again shows the primary place music has in his affections in this, his first novel. William Carberry is a 53-year-old who gave up a role as the lead singer and guitarist of a moderately successful band, VineHeart, after an accident that shattered him and still haunts him. Instead, he took up a post as a salesman in the bed linen department of an Oxford Street department store, a job he enjoys despite recognising its modest value in the world. One day, 38-year-old Lucy Taplow, who works part-time in a bakery, buys a pillow in his department, and wonders if they’ve previously met. They have, but it was not in the most jovial of circumstances.

The novel follows the two in alternate chapters, William’s related in the first person, Lucy’s in the third. Their family circumstances are explored: Will’s French mother is dying of cancer and is being cared for by Will’s sister, while Lucy’s mother lives in Aldeburgh where she is disgusted by the influx of yuppies, not seeming to realise that her son, Lucy’s brother, and his wife who works in TV, are prime examples of the breed themselves. Coleman is good on family dynamics, his portrayal being free of sentimentality; for example, Lucy feels little love for her indulged nephew and niece.

This is a thoroughly modern exploration of a relationship, each side weighed down by baggage, be it Lucy’s clingy ex Steve or Will’s burden of guilt for the accident in which he was involved. Coleman’s passion for music is evident in Will’s ruminations about the music scene and in a gig he is persuaded to play in with VineHeart’s previous bassist Jolyon.

Coleman imbues his writing with a dry wit that enlivens the everyday, and with pithy character descriptions. We are told, for example, that Lucy’s “morning’s baking was going to be a pleasure, with or without exposure to Oleg’s conviction that tart-baking is a mournful undertaking and, as such, requires of the baker an undertaker’s solemnity.”

One of the most absorbing facets of this engrossing story is the free reign Coleman gives his characters to daydream, and the eloquence with which he describes moods (there is a wonderful recipe for the stewing that occurs when several tenacious problems are mulled together) and the multitudes of small doubts and insecurities that beset the beginning of all relationships. The whole makes for a thoughtful and sensitive dissection of modern lives.