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Tom Finn has moved his family from North London to the beach paradise of Phuket to make a new start. Becoming notorious as the "Travis Bickle of Barnsbury" was merely the culmination of his woes, but a shady Mr Big has thrown him a lifeline with a job as a driver on the beautiful island. To reveal more of the plot would ruin it, but the book's granite-hewn family values and treacly sentimentality tell us we are in prime Parsons territory. You can take the man out of north London and set him down on golden sand, but his archetypes will accompany him, jostling for a place close to his massive, lachrymose heart: the decent working man, the mother of his children whom he worships like a Neolithic deity, and the children themselves, repositories of innate and luminous wisdom. Nine-year-old Rory is a pocket-sized Attenborough who delivers constant lectures on Thai wildlife and weeps for man's cruelty to the beasts. Meanwhile his father seeks a proper outlet for his manliness: as his wife reassures him, "You can be a good man, Tom."
Guardian review
Catching the Sun by Tony Parsons review
the guardian Tue 08 May 2012
Tom Finn has moved his family from North London to the beach paradise of Phuket to make a new start. Becoming notorious as the "Travis Bickle of Barnsbury" was merely the culmination of his woes, but a shady Mr Big has thrown him a lifeline with a job as a driver on the beautiful island. To reveal more of the plot would ruin it, but the book's granite-hewn family values and treacly sentimentality tell us we are in prime Parsons territory. You can take the man out of north London and set him down on golden sand, but his archetypes will accompany him, jostling for a place close to his massive, lachrymose heart: the decent working man, the mother of his children whom he worships like a Neolithic deity, and the children themselves, repositories of innate and luminous wisdom. Nine-year-old Rory is a pocket-sized Attenborough who delivers constant lectures on Thai wildlife and weeps for man's cruelty to the beasts. Meanwhile his father seeks a proper outlet for his manliness: as his wife reassures him, "You can be a good man, Tom."
