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The Last Ealing Comedy
The Last Ealing Comedy
Apr 19, 2025 12:20 AM

Author:Matthew Baylis

The Last Ealing Comedy

Alastair Strange is having trouble. His girlfriend Martha, tired of late night telly and takeaway pizzas, has reinvented herself as the real estate princess of Putney. His dream job has turned into a nightmare and his Dad's been arrested for burglary. Just when things couldn't get worse, along comes Alastair's old friend, society It-girl Tara, with a tantalising job offer. Alastair finds himself teaching media studies in an Ealing school. A cushy number, he thinks, but that's before Tara calls the favour in- The derelict Ealing Studios are next to the school - their presence haunts Alastair and acts as a continual motif for his story, combining the quirky wit and eccentricity of the Ealing films with an eye for the absurdities of modern urban life. Flat-sharing with the impossible Davenport, dealing with mysterious girls on the bus and disastrous blind dates, it would seem that there is, perhaps, one last comedy left in Ealing.

Reviews

'Slowly draws you into its mythological world...Borchardt weaves in threads begging to be followed'

—— Starburst

'Wildly imaginative and astonishingly exhilarating'

—— Interzone

Fantastically realised... strong, believable characters, lashings of fast-paced action

—— ELOQUENTPAGE.COM

Superbly powerful... A rich, evocative book

—— Spectator

Like all first-class comedians, he is deadly serious

—— Terry Eagleton , Stand

Paul Durcan has a great comic gift

—— Colb Toibin , Sunday Independent

By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James

—— Harold Bloom

His mind to him a kingdom was; or rather, a county, Yoknapatawpha. He breathed on it and gave it life, a luminous world of rustics, comic and sinister, of inchoate historical processes and tragic human beings, earning dignity by endurance

—— Independent
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