Scarecrow

A beautifully written and truly unputdownable novel. Lily is a terrific character in her own right, but it's the unsettling, ambiguous relationship with her father that really makes the novel: a breathtaking piece of character writing that keeps you guessing all the way and never seems destined for a happy ending.

Around them move a wonderful array of secondary characters - alive and dead, real and imaginary, born and unborn - all of whom play their own significant role in shaping Lily's destiny. And it may be a cliche to say it, but if ever there was a novel where the setting was a character in its own right then this is it: the backdrop of 1970s rural England is completely infused in every scene without ever taking centre stage.

Gary Parkinson is clearly a force to be reckoned with and this book deserves to go very far. Read it now and one day you'll be telling everyone how you were in at the start.

The tone here has you in thrall from page one. It's mesmerizing. Lilly is an extraordinarily complex character, so beautifully drawn that you suffer and share her every emotion. The drama of the story is so huge that in less subtle hands it would crash around you like breeze blocks, but here the touch is so light and evocative that you never turn away from the page and the mood follows you around long after you've put the book down.

Gary, you really write with passion and I was immediately gripped my this. I write about an abusive father/daughter relationship in my current book, so I was interested to see how you handled it here.

I thought Lily was a brilliant character and I empathised with her, even though I didn't want to pity her. I loved how she struggled to believe in anything - nature and the scarecrow were touching. I feel I have to read on, to support her somehow! I'm sure we're going to be amazed at her inner strength.

I'm going to add you to my list, and shall be back to read more. This is good stuff. Really. Keep going.

Lily is a fantastic character and the narrative is strong and compelling. The sense of menace is very real and the pace is well judged. A very strong piece of work.

ARISE, AUTHONOMY GHOST!

Ease those weary, withered limbs from your coffin. Push away the stone from the mouth of the tomb.

You have one last task to perform. One last, sacred shelf to confer.

Whether you were plugger, spammer, gusher or troll, whether you flirted or fought in the forum or beavered away in the shadows, now is the time for your resurrection.

One last time. Marshall your strength, muster the last vestiges of your power and carry out your final Authonomy act:

Back my book, MIRROR IN THE SKY.

Then, only then, you may rest easy in your Authonomy grave.

Nick Poole2 (formerly known as NickP)

This is like the soft low sweet breaking of my heart. Can you lay your neck on my hot thirsty palm that I might squeeze the life out of its pulsing and inherit that talent. Or perhaps just hold the book in my hand. Wait. Oprah's on the phone. Damn. It's for you. Shelved.

I really liked this one. It will go far. T x

Reading it again, I find myself uncomfortably inside a kind of father that I hope I will never be/never could be. And I only have sons, and the walls they put up are rather different.

Just reached the end of Chapter 6 - I'll look forward to reading more of this.

I love the complexity of Lily - one moment referring to herself as tough and hard, the next as soft and young and tender - you certainly know how to effectively convey insights into character that are unrecognised by the character herself - the mark of really good, subtle writing. I'll be interested to see where you're taking this -

Wow - making my way through and I can't stop! The brittleness of her, the sensitivity - she doesn't know how fragile she is - covers it up with filthy tough talk like a child, and she is a kid - and she just accepts her life and the nature of life like an old woman with no choices left, all the choices long-made, or made for her...

And mate, those dying birds... this is really effective and affective - you're really getting to me...!

Remarkable. I love this.

I've only read the first chapter and it is so evocative... The girl's voice is absolutely natural - and 'supernatural' in the sense that there's a wisdom and a calm and a poetry to it that makes her seem more than than she is, almost as though she speaks with a wisdom coming out of the earth and trees around her - - but it's not jarring at all, it works - uttterly, utterly! It's like she's both her 'self' the character and something much more - she carries or conveys so much more - and this quality set up against that derisive attitude from her father is so poignant.

Am I making sense at all?? I can't rave enough about this. You've got something magic here.

- Pink

I'm different in every way - sex, age and completely different problems - but Lily's life and its combination of the mundane and the magical takes me with it entirely. I felt that knee-scrape.

I'm different in every way - sex, age and completely different problems - but Lily's life and its combination of the mundane and the magical takes me with it entirely. I felt that knee-scrape.

There's the stuff I write and then there's books like this. They make me feel like a child. And I'm forty-four for Christ's sake! Love the vivid brutallity of the language. Echoes of 'The Drum' with a newborn baby having such well-formed thoughts... Only just dipped in for now but will try and read some more soon.
Cheers
Blackheart

Hi, i've just read the first chapter. Very good. Fluid and descriptive. The sing song repetitions hint at an unstable narrator. I took only a couple of notes, which means i was engrossed!

Very good pitch
Just wondering if it was Lightfoot's or Lightfoots' ?

I'm happy to back this and i hope to read on. I can't actually remember how this came to be on my watchlist. I think you may have asked me to read it? Sorry it's taken me a while to get to it. If you were able to have a peep at 'Witch Child', especially before the end of the month, that would be great...

Some great flights of description that put me in mind of Flannery O'Connor, a favorite of mine.

Gary, not sure I have a lot of anything constructive or helpful to say. I'm just glad to find someone else who has a foul-mouthed young girl for a character. I should shelve this book if for no other reason.

The truth is the story engaged me from the first sentence, I love the girl's attitude, her voice is absolutely spot on and so she becomes very real. The imagery you conjure with very spare sentences is impressive (the moles on the fence, the father in the bath, the dog, the old man with chickens running around in his house). The writing is absolute craft, in my opinion. This is exactly the sort of book I would pick up, buy, take home and stay up all night reading until I finished, then oversleep and be late for work the next day. I only read the opening 3 chapters here. I'm not even sure I spotted a single typo or anything (which I can usually see them a mile away). I don't know if the copy is that clean, or if I was so caught up on the character, the story and the writing during my train ride to work this morning that I just didn't notice any glitches.

I'm just glad you have this posted on authonomy where I can come back to it and enjoy it at a hopefully not too distant future when I get caught up on some other things.

Best of luck with this,

Robb

Thanks for your comments, I'm blown away by the response it's been getting.

The Cinderella/Rapunzel thing I feel OK about: Bailey isn't from a deprived home, his home always "smells of baking and furniture polish". He's not very bright, but I just think that those fairytales would have been read to him as a child. And Lily's smart, you may not have got to it yet, but she reads her mum's Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.

As for Lily being unperturbed, give it time (I've just uploaded some more). But the voice of the Scarecrow was always meant to be Lily's response to the horror that's going on in her life, a symptom of her fracturing personality. But the further in you get, hopefully you'll start to see more of Lily's erratic and damaged behaviour.

Anyway, thanks for all the encouragement and interest.

Gary

Gary, your prose is such that I simply have to give this book a place on my shelf. I heard about “Scarecrow” in a forum discussion, and of course was not put off by someone’s complaining about the grim subject. There’s a point at which beautiful writing transforms any subject, and you have certainly accomplished that. I’m a sucker for good analogies, and you have several (e.g., “the beer fumes would come off them like a gas leak”).

I can find very little to quibble about here. I think it’s good to go as-is, but while I have your attention what do you think of the following:

Is it credible that these apparently deprived young people are capable of the parallel Bailey draws when he climbs onto the roof with her shoe (“Cinderella,” he says. “Not Rapunzel.”)? While perfectly appropriate to the context, it seems perhaps too sophisticated and detached.

The girl’s father is laughably incompetent, and yet he is the authority figure she has always known. So I wonder at her ability to remain unperturbed. I wonder if she has always been aloof? Perhaps “howling never gets you anywhere” is her motto. Still, the whole time I was reading I was looking for an explanation of how she transcended her environment, or learned to insulate herself from it.

Bottom line, however: This is exemplary writing. I’m impressed.

Gary,
Wow! This is a powerful read. I was shocked at the opening. I have put you on my shelf. Best of luck.
Charity

Thanks for your fantastic comments.

To answer your point about the sparseness of the punctuation - it was very deliberate; long, unbroken sentences to give a feeling of rambling, to tie in with the rural surroundings, which I feel are as important to the book as Lily is.

I agree with 'Mums and Dads' being capitalised, but I'm not sure about adding the 'was' in the other line. I agree though, it does read a little awkwardly. Maybe it should be 'That's all I ever wanted: not to be seen.'

This whole site is still a bit new to me and I'm still feeling my way round it, finding out how it works. But I'll be uploading more next week.

Thanks again

Gary

Gary, this is beautiful. I only wish you'd put more up because 4 chapters is not enough...

The imagery is powerful and evocative: I let out a breath like a flower...massive rocks like monsters' fists (by the way, you wrote 'monster's':-)) ...too many to choose from, in fact.

Lily is a poignant figure - tough but damaged...sad, melancholic but also witty. I really want to read the rest of this so do please put up some more...

Sometimes I think you could do with a bit more punctuation in some sentences, which I feel are too long. And I noticed a sentence that didn't quite make sense in ch 2 - 'That's all I ever wanted, (WAS) not to be seen' . I also think the game 'Mums and Dads' should have capital first letters.

But these are minor nitpicks and the only 'faults' I could find...overall, this is, for me, perfect.

I am, of course, backing it immediately :-)

Truly excellent and shelved immediately. The refreshing quality of the prose (sentences using evokative words and images instead of being used merely for effect) and the fact that the paragraphs are of a reasonable length suggests we are in the presence of someone who knows what they are about, knows how they want to write and is not afraid to do so.

Gary, this is beautiful. I only wish you'd put more up because 4 chapters is not enough...

The imagery is powerful and evocative: I let out a breath like a flower...massive rocks like monsters' fists (by the way, you wrote 'monster's':-)) ...too many to choose from, in fact.

Lily is a poignant figure - tough but damaged...sad, melancholic but also witty. I really want to read the rest of this so do please put up some more...

Sometimes I think you could do with a bit more punctuation in some sentences, which I feel are too long. And I noticed a sentence that didn't quite make sense in ch 2 - 'That's all I ever wanted, (WAS) not to be seen' . I also think the game 'Mums and Dads' should have capital first letters.

But these are minor nitpicks and the only 'faults' I could find...overall, this is, for me, perfect.

I am, of course, backing it immediately :-)

Hi Gary

Just came to have a quick look at our book and ended up reading all you've uploaded - your writing draws the reader into this internal world of Lily's. There is a real sense of melancholy and threat here and I hope you will be posting more on the site. It should be much further up the rankings and I have shelved this.

Frankie

Fantastic book. Forget work, I was just engrossed, couldn't put it down. Janet

There is magic here. It's wonderfully written: the language, sence of time and place and the drama - all circling round and round Lily.
Gary Parkinson has created brilliantly a character here that will haunt you. I have this picture of a skinny kid with mousey hair in my mind ... she'll be there for some time.

A beautifully written and truly unputdownable novel. Lily is a terrific character in her own right, but it's the unsettling, ambiguous relationship with her father that really makes the novel: a breathtaking piece of character writing that keeps you guessing all the way and never seems destined for a happy ending.

Around them move a wonderful array of secondary characters - alive and dead, real and imaginary, born and unborn - all of whom play their own significant role in shaping Lily's destiny. And it may be a cliche to say it, but if ever there was a novel where the setting was a character in its own right then this is it: the backdrop of 1970s rural England is completely infused in every scene without ever taking centre stage.

Gary Parkinson is clearly a force to be reckoned with and this book deserves to go very far. Read it now and one day you'll be telling everyone how you were in at the start.

Bloody brilliant.

The tone here has you in thrall from page one. It's mesmerizing. Lilly is an extraordinarily complex character, so beautifully drawn that you suffer and share her every emotion. The drama of the story is so huge that in less subtle hands it would crash around you like breeze blocks, but here the touch is so light and evocative that you never turn away from the page and the mood follows you around long after you've put the book down.

Here's a lightness of touch in the telling of a complex, layered tale.

I love this book so far - please post more.

Lily is a fantastic character and the narrative is strong and compelling. The sense of menace is very real and the pace is well judged. A very strong piece of work.

This is a brilliant piece of fiction, by turns witty, incisive and downright devastating. If this doesn't achieve publication, there's no justice.

Thanks Gillian. I love Lily too, and I don't feel like I created her - she just appeared fully formed. The book is finished, so I'll upload some more soon. Really glad you liked it.

Gary

Gary, you really write with passion and I was immediately gripped my this. I write about an abusive father/daughter relationship in my current book, so I was interested to see how you handled it here.

I thought Lily was a brilliant character and I empathised with her, even though I didn't want to pity her. I loved how she struggled to believe in anything - nature and the scarecrow were touching. I feel I have to read on, to support her somehow! I'm sure we're going to be amazed at her inner strength.

I'm going to add you to my list, and shall be back to read more. This is good stuff. Really. Keep going.

Gosh, thanks Liz, I'm very flattered by your comments. Really glad you liked it. I haven't read AA Gill's novel, but I'll seek it out.

Thanks again.

Gary

Hey, thanks, Ruthy. Hope you enjoy it. Well, 'enjoy's not really the word, but, y'know.

Love the title. Love the synopsis. I intend to read on...