BOOKS FROM ENGLANDHouse Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy
Tags:
Set in England
Male author
Description:
House Mother Normal is a remarkable study of old age. It is also a major modern novel. B.S. Johnson's achievement in this 'geriatric comedy' was to deploy his prodigious technical skills and inventiveness to explore the minds of the old with precision, humour and unflagging compassion. He recognised its technical difficulties:'What I wanted to do was to take an evening in an old people's home, and see a single set of events through the eyes of not less than eight old people. Due to the various deformities and deficiencies of the inmates, these events would seem to be progressively "abnormal" to the reader. At the end there would be the viewpoint of the House Mother, an apparently "normal" person, and the events themselves would then be seen to be so bizarre that everything that had come before would seem "normal" by comparison.'Making each speaker's section follow the same chronological sequence, not only page by page but also line by line, he achieves a disturbingly vivid multi-dimensional effect.
