Book review: From There to Here by Joe Bennett

From There to Here by Joe Bennett

From There to Here by Joe Bennett (Harper Collins, $35). Reviewed by Louise Ward

I picked up this book, laughed out loud at the first paragraph, and immediately read it aloud to the person within range, who also laughed.

It’s a memoir of Joe Bennett’s early life, offering snapshots of recollection and emotion, some as bright and raw decades after the event as they were at the time.

Young Joe, born Julian, grew up in Sussex and his chief interests were fishing and cricket. The fishing stories give us insight into Joe’s brother, Nigel; Joe is still surprised that his surly older sibling, who ‘struggled all his life with the world’s official rhythm’, should pay him such interest. Nigel had ‘no gift for friendship’, but a gift for fishing that he shared with Joe.

Nearby Brighton is described thus: ‘The beach had never been sandy. The weather had never been Spanish.’

There is more to know about Brighton, but as a condensed description, this is pretty accurate.

Through cricket and fishing, young Joe studies masculinity: cricket sheds smell of men; casting a line was ‘the theatre of manhood’; silent fishermen are a ‘fraternity’. The men Joe admires are quiet, unambitious. Women don’t get much of a mention, apart from the ‘plump local girls’ who get off with visiting French schoolboys.

The tone of the book is understated and self-deprecatory. Young Julian, known as Podge, is preoccupied by observing manhood, being chubby, failing to be brave. This is a man who doesn’t want to be trapped in a teaching career, but nearly is; who suffers abuse at the hands of a predatory cricket coach until inadvertently saved; who ends up in New Zealand because someone who knew someone rang him. Joe watches his past self with a wry, dry eye.

The thing that kept me reading, for hours on end until the book was done, was the way in which Joe Bennet can nail a place, a person, a memory in a sharp phrase:

‘… his head was a beard with two eyes in it.’

‘… a mug of tea you could trot a mouse on.’

‘Villains and idiots are easy to paint. The kind are not.’

You’ll find your own favourites and end up with a book as marked up in pencil (or, gasp, pen), as mine.

Memoir is quite different to autobiography. It allows a writer to embellish, withhold, offer intimacy … or not. From There to Here is a ramble through a young life that many of us have lived, but most of us wouldn’t stand a chance of articulating with such beauty.