Sex, Lies and Shakespeare

 

This extraordinary memoir traces the various births of Christopher Rush—the lover, the truth-teller, and the writer. In exuberant prose drawing its inspiration from the Bard himself, but also from Chaucer, Dickens, and D. H. Lawrence, Rush depicts his adolescent years with a vitality and accuracy which are both thrilling, and at times, unavoidably uncomfortable. From the poignant scene of his father's leave-taking, through the young Rush's failure to take flight at school and the comedy of his awakening sexuality, we are brought to moments of high epiphany when the bedrock of Rush's personality take shape, and the expectations of his vividly portrayed community are overthrown. Shakespeare speaks to our narrator's adolescent self through the then new medium of television, and the world is changed forever. Rush's subsequent Olympian addiction to the woks of his master is euphoric and overpowering. The coming years are to see the development of a writer whose knowledge of Shakespeare is unsurpassed, and which explains how he came to write his novel Will, in which we finally hear the voice of the great playwright telling the story of his own life.