Snowleg

Information and Book Review

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Nicholas Shakespeare

Nicholas Shakespeare was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 1993.  He is the award-winning author of several books, including The Dancer Upstairs.

Peter Hithersay, at the beginning of Snowleg, is a young English boy at boarding school, occupied with history lessons, cricket matches, and the usual jockeying for position that underpins adolescent life.  His imagination is fed largely by Arthurian mythology, and when Peter idealizes himself in his mind, it is as Sir Bedevere, resplendent with his heroic chivalry  in battle and his gallantry towards the fairer sex.

One weekend, Peter goes home for his sixteenth birthday celebration and is dumbfounded to learn that the very fabric of his comfortable, secure existence is not what he's taken for granted all of his life, but rather a fiction that seems more fantastical to him than his daydreams of himself as the archetypical valiant knight.

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The banqueting room lay at the rear of the building.  Czech chandeliers and gilt-framed oil paintings and at intervals, positioned along the middle of it, square white pillars edged in gold.  Against the far wall and separated from the rest of the room by a worn curtain patterned with tropical flowers stretched along a long oval table.

Sepp had failed to impress on Peter that the reception was not in fact a cocktail party but a formal dinner.  About thirty people sat around the table.  Peter was introduced too quickly to remember who they were.  He recognized the author from the Book Fair and a children's publisher who had paid for their train tickets.  The remainder were diplomats and businessmen visiting the Trade Fair.  They shook his hand and half rose from their seats before resuming their conversations.

Peter was seated next to the Permanent Representative's wife, a bulbous white-haired woman in a sturdy jade dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves.  She opened her mouth as soon as she learned who he was and filled it quickly with polite conversation, from time to time rearranging crumbs on the white cloth.

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