‘Meeting the English’, by Kate Clanchy

Meeting the English, by Kate Clanchy, Picador, RRP£7.99, 320 pages

Kate Clanchy’s sharp and charming first novel is set in Hampstead in the hot summer of 1989. Struan Robertson, an academically gifted, potato-pale, 17-year-old youth from Scotland, answers an advert in the London Review of Books: “Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair.”

Struan is soon plunged into the life of the playwright and novelist Phillip Prys, a man whose work he has studied. Phillip, who has had a stroke and can no longer speak, was rather inhuman when well. Yet Struan treats his charge with tremendous compassion and respect.

Clanchy, a distinguished poet, writes prose to relish. The passages in which Prys, post-stroke, tries to make sense of the odd new reality are confidently handled and convincing. A strong, rather gallant novel of family life and what (if anything) can be done about it.