The News Where You Are Book

If there were a movement similar to the food lovers' Slow Food movement for book readers, author Catherine O'Flynn would definitely be a leading member. The Slow Reading movement would celebrate ingredients such as solid, traditional writing that is in no way flashy or trendy, but that leisurely cooks up an engaging and rewarding book using relaxed but excellent character development and employing skilful and plausible plots.
O'Flynn also manages to season her books with totally palatable sprinklings of large social issues. In the case of her first book, 'What Was Lost' (winner of the prestigious Costa First Novel Prize in UK and long listed for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize), the big issue was the troubling anonymity of many people in modern society, the disadvantaged in particular, especially in the context of large-scale urban landscapes. Buildings and town centres of an inhuman scale are also a recurring theme in 'The News Where You Are,' but the larger issue in O'Flynn's second book is ageing. Anonymity also features again, but in this book it rears its ugly head when people are forgotten after their perceived usefulness has run its course.
The main protagonist in 'The News From Here' is a reflective forty-something TV newscaster, Frank, who is understandably preoccupied with death and ageing. His predecessor at the television station died in a hit and run when on the verge of retirement and his mother appears to be fading away in a featureless retirement home. When Frank reports on an apparently friendless widower who is found dead on a roadside bench, he becomes determined not to let the man go unremembered. In the process of his investigations and as the plot thickens, Frank gradually emerges as a totally sympathetic character, as do his patient wife and live-wire of a young daughter, Mo.
But all is not doom and gloom, O'Flynn gives Frank's self-pitying mother some wonderful zingers. When Mo tells her grandmother that she's been looking for fossils with no success, Frank's mother tells the young girl to come to the retirement residence where she can find fossils eating in the dining room every day of the week. O'Flynn also wittily and effectively mines the comedic aspects of value placed on appearance that is part and parcel of being a television personality.
O'Flynn's writing isn't for everyone. If you prefer fast-paced action, plots with startling 180-degree turns, or zippy repartee, this book is not for you. But if you like characters who come to feel like old friends and physical descriptions that slowly but surely place you in a reassuringly distinctive, if dreary, landscape I predict you'll love 'The News From Here.'
If I have any reservations at all, it's that the final plot revelation seemed a little bit of a stretch, but it's a very small quibble.