Paul Magrs – Exchange

l21/04/2015

Iโ€™d read a lot of his stuff before, and we have mutual friends (enough for me to know his surname sounds like โ€˜Marsโ€™), but that didnโ€™t help as much as Iโ€™d expected here. Yes, I pretty much figured out the way the relationship between the shy, bereaved outsider Simon and the equally bookish Goth-chick Kelly would pan out but I was wrong-footed by everything else.

The prose-style (and the rather misleading blurb) keep you half-expecting things that donโ€™t quite materialise. You think Kellyโ€™s going to sprout wings next chapter and she doesnโ€™t. The book-exchange at the core of the novel isnโ€™t really any bigger inside and the back room doesnโ€™t lead to adventures like in Mr Benn. At least, not that kind of adventure. Simonโ€™s grandparents look likely to come to blows but their conflict, predictably over reading and its uses, goes in an odd direction and is resolved offstage. Simonโ€™s gran, Winnie, has a relationship with the once-local celebrity author Ada Jones (obviously Catherine Cookson) and the flashbacks make it seem as if a Big Secret is about to be revealed, but thatโ€™s not quite what we get either. Magrs usually combines Magic Realist malarkey with very detailed descriptions of his home town in the North East but the place-names and specifics are replaced by vagueries and the locale became more generic here.

At heart this is a book about the power of books to heal. The character with most of the wisdom to make this work is the Exchangeโ€™s manager, Terrance (and for those mutual friends and me that spelling is significant but heโ€™s more than an in-joke). Heโ€™s barely in it. Instead, the characters who donโ€™t find books, especially Adaโ€™s books, especially valuable are all shown as part of the reason Simon and Kelly will probably leave this town soon. Thereโ€™s a lot left unsaid in this book, and at several stages itโ€™s almost possible to imagine the author considering where the story will go next and deciding against what he really wanted to do because thatโ€™s exactly what we all expect. This isnโ€™t a bad thing, as for once the restraining of his usual exuberence and jiggery-pokery is what the book needs. But if you pick up that sense that magicโ€™s almost about to happen once every couple of chapters it can be frustrating. Iโ€™ve already told you how un-fantastical events in this book are but itโ€™s written by someone who sees the everyday world as potentially no different from a wild tale of enchantment.

By Tat Wood