Book Review: Entertaining Strangers by Jonathan Taylor

Published By Salt, 2012


What first drew me to Entertaining Strangers was a review note on the back cover suggesting that the novel was a) funny and b) traversed a multitude of topics including ‘landladies, eccentrics, philosophers, bad families, music, degenerates, and ants.’ All of which I have had, as they say, ‘things to do with’ in some way. As it turns out, the plot is as surreal as this list suggests, and the book is funny – but it is also dark and tragic, with glimpses of horror and a narrative that is curiously compelling, given that lengthy passages are given over to the central character’s descriptions of ant behaviour. 
 
Ants are just one of Edwin Prince’s obsessions though, along with (much more to my taste) the music of Krysztof Penderecki and a searching for wider answers in the mutability of consonance and dissonance. There is rhyme here, and reason too of a kind, as we gradually discover through the book’s narrator, Jules; a homeless man who literally falls into Edwin’s (even more) wayward life after ‘I’d sat down for a minute on a dog-piss-soaked doorstep in a dog-piss street in a dog-piss town, when the door I was leaning against gave behind me.’ Not quite Alice down the rabbit-hole – but echoes of that within a colder, meaner cityscape. 

However, there is warmth in the book too, not least because Jules comes to care for Edwin despite his melodramatic ways and defensive arrogance, and tries to help him repair his life against the odds; a thankless task which entails learning to look the mirror in the eye. Indeed, Taylor’s novel contains many touching, and often blackly comic, vignettes, set against a deeper, shadowing history of the terrible ethnic cleansing of the Armenians by the Ottomans, which slowly emerges through analogies of music and of madness. It is also well written and bravely ambitious, with an unforced, sincere compassion and many fine passages of no little anger which settle in unexpected corners of the mind.