Weeping for Joy
Aida Edemariam follows Dexter Petley's satisfyingly pessimistic romantic quest through Africa and France in White Lies
The Times - February 7, 2004
Whether stumbling through Kenya and Uganda or slithering down the greased pole of poorly planned self-sufficiency in a northern French farmhouse, Norman's life is as ramshackle as his surroundings. White Lies begins in the 1990s when his wife Joy leaves both him and France and returns to Africa. Petley interweaves the aftermath of this desertion with Norman's wanderings through the chaos of post-colonial East Africa a decade earlier, where the pair met. The two sections are heavy with an atmosphere of decay: one can feel the damp rot of Le Haut Bois, the farmland tussocky with grown-over remnants of the Allied invasion and German retreat. The African sections apprehend social breakdown brilliantly. Violence, intimidation and almost perverse outbreaks of boredom are related in gripping, elliptical prose, Petley walking a line between reportage and hallucinatory detail reminiscent of Waugh's account of the withdrawal from Crete in Officers and Gentlemen. Both a damaged love story and a frank accounting of colonialism's legacy, White Lies is unusual and superb.
Joyride, 4th Estate, 1999
JOYRIDE
Josh's childhood has always been fuelled by the need to escape, from his car obsessed Dad, his fed-up Mum, and the assortment of crazed neighbours littering his Sussex childhood. When Josh meets F at Highgate Ponds years later he knows she is his last chance. They travel to America, but their desperate journey fails to deliver the carp-filled dream continent Josh had imagined. Joyride... is a unique and poetic, anarchic tragedy.
Reviews:
Tibor Fischer
"Izaac Walton with attitude and Mogadon. Joyride brilliantly captures the bucolic dark side."
Derek Beaven
"The American dream is deftly filleted of its glamour by a dangerous Englishman. Petley's style is like acid on a plate, biting into whatever it sees and leaving extraordinary linguistic marks."
Little Nineveh, Polygon 1995
LITTLE NINEVEH
In the 1960s a schoolgirl is murdered in a rural Kent village. A local misfit is convicted, and that seems to be the end of the matter. Cedric Lily, the narrator, a schoolboy at the time, becomes obsessed with what really happened that Saturday. There were four of them in the vicinity of the murder, but only Cedric keeps alive what they saw. The gang were never friends again. Between them they knew something, but the others with-held their pieces. Milky White made sure of that. What had he really seen? Why was he there when they weren't even friends? Milky's presence that day begins to haunt Cedric. Years later, in the windswept Northeast of Scotland, Cedric confronts Milky White who is working as museum curator on a ramshackle estate. Through a hall of fictional mirrors ending in personality theft and illusion, Little Nineveh portrays the darker side of schoolboy emnity and keeps the reader guessing till the end.
