Down the Figure 7

It may be an increasingly overused cliché, but the past – even our own – can genuinely seem like a foreign country where people did things differently; especially if it's a monochromatic Northern cotton town crawling its way out of the shortages and rationing after the Second World War. This ‘fictional memoir’ focuses on the small, contained world of 11 year old Terry Webb, brighter than his peers (though smart enough to generally disguise it and so avoid unwanted attention from older bullies) but increasingly frustrated by how much he still has to grasp and understand about life in general and the thought processes of girls in particular. Atmospheric in its own way – in part thanks to the small classified advertisements from 50s newspapers scattered through the book, Down The Figure 7 clearly aims to evoke the joys, frustrations, injustices, excitement, revels, battles, games, uncertainties, questions, lies, discoveries and sheer of bloody-minded wonder of a boy slowly learning to become a man, but its third person narrative is occasionally distancing. Though it may be unfair to compare this book with the enrapturing first person narrative of James Kelman’s Kieron Smith, boy, Hoyle’s ‘fictional memoir’ is an urban childhood many streets behind. [Paul F. Cockburn]