Product Description

On the coldest night of 1975, a young man with shock-red hair tears though the snowbound streets of Warrington's toughest housing estate. He is Robbie Fitzgerald, and he is running for his life - and that of his young family. In his heart, Robbie knows the odds are stacked against them. In this unbending Northern town, he has married the beautiful brown nurse who once stitched up his wounds. Susheela is his Tamil Princess, but in the real world, the Fitzgeralds have to face up to prejudice, poverty and sheer naked hatred from their neighbours. Now Robbie has seen a way out, and he's sprinting to his date with destiny...But back at their low-rise flat, Susheela hears a noise. This single moment starts a chain of events that will reverberate throughout the lives of all four Fitzgeralds - herself, Robbie, their son Vincent and unborn daughter, Ellie. Over thirteen years of struggle, aspiration, achievement, misunderstandings, near-misses and shattered dreams, Helen Walsh plunges us into the lives and loves of the young, doomed Fitzgerald family. She shows herself to be a brilliant chronicler of our people and our times. And in the Fitzgeralds, she has created a family who will stay in your heart, long after the final page."Once Upon A Time In England" offers an unforgettable portrait of the world in which we live, and confirms Helen Walsh as a writer of searing power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112948 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

New Statesman
one of the 20 best novels published this year

The Times
... Walsh's writing has a wonderful, propulsive exuberance.

Telegraph
the kind of book whose events you find yourself repeating to friends.

Customer Reviews

An excellent antidote to 70s and 80s nostalgia
Once Upon a Time in England - where to start? The initial ingredients are: the 1970s, the north of England, and a mixed marriage. You know something bad is going to happen.

Robbie is a carrot headed man of Irish heritage, living in Warrington. He sings with showbands and goes down a storm. Susheela is a Malay Indian from Kuala Lumpur who came to England to train as a nurse and find a husband. She found Robbie. Helen Walsh visits the family at three significant times - 1975, 1981 and 1989. In the first installment, Robbie and Susheela are in love; they have a young son Vincent and Susheela is expecting a second. But there are already tensions. The couple already seem to be divided on the question of exotic spice - whether in food (Susheela would like some, Robbie wouldn't) or in life in general. Robbie finds himself ostracized for his mixed marriage and he seems to find escape in his singing. Meanwhile, Susheela is threatened, and before long is raped in her own home by a gang of skinheads as part of a racial assault. Susheela tries to play it down - she decides to tell neither the police nor Robbie what really happened, but in truth she has lost her confidence for ever. By way of escape, she aims to integrate herself into white suburbia, surrounding herself with symbols of bland safety. And from this unpromising start, the family's lives start to unravel over the course of the next fourteen years.

The success of the novel is the enormity of what it takes on. It addresses a whole heap of social issues - race, mixed marriage, rape, homosexuality, queer bashing, drugs, social class, adultery, ambition, and the list goes on. Yet the skill is that it never feels as though it is ticking issues off on a list. Susheela is not a token Asian; Vincent is not a token gay; Ellen is not a token teenage rebel. Nobody is there to play a part, rather the story unravels around people who are, simply, themselves. That results in a work that is very engaging, very credible and very intense. The depth of the problems and issues makes for a very rich experience.

It's also striking that Helen Walsh avoided the trap of creating one-dimensional victims. To a great extent, the characters do not help themselves. There is the feeling that, for example, Vincent is not bullied because he is black, but because he is weak. There is wrong choice after wrong choice. Moving to Thelwall; not reporting the rape; choosing the wrong school bag; buying the wrong car; going to the wrong school; ... It is a catalogue of distasters, some of which might even be funny if they were not so tragic. This is lightened by the occasional glimmer of hope - Ellie's scholarship to the private school; Vincent's writing prize; Robbie's affair; Susheela's friendship with (horrors) Robbie's boss's wife. But each hope proves to be a false dawn.

The ending, when it comes, is both noble and squalid. It shocks to the core.

The novel is not without fault. There are a couple of glaring anachronisms. And more worryingly, the first thirty or forty pages felt like wading through a thick fog of alliteration and flowery language that obscured all meaning. Perhaps this died back after the opening chapters or perhaps the rape had an immediacy that broke through the over-writing. But once the first tension has been built, and seen through to a horrific denouement, there is nothing more to distract - just pure, raw, deep emotion.

Once Upon a Time in England is a valuable testament to the times and places it describes. 1970s and 1980s England was a hard place to grow up. Young people had to make conscious decisions about whether to take a path of racism and bigotry, or whether to take a more liberal view. Many felt enormous social pressure to swing to the right. This is an unsentimental depiction of the effect that such decisions, such pressure had on fellow man.

Once Upon a Time in England is an excellent antidote to 70s and 80s nostalgia. They were not glory days, they were hard times.

Not the sort of book i would normally read but i,m glad i did.
I am a voracious reader yet this type of book (contemporary urban fiction I suppose) is not the sort of thing I would normally read. I usually read sci-fi , fantasy , horror thrillers or non- fiction yet for some reason I wanted to read this book and whatever sixth sense made me want to do that was especially well attuned that day For Once Upon A Time In England is a stunning memorable book.
I assume it's fair to call Once Upon A Time In England a modern kitchen sink drama though it is also fair to say it covers more universal theme's like how bigotry and racial intolerance tear families and communities apart and breed more intolerance. The story starts in the 1970,s where flame haired Robbie Fitzgerald is married to his Malaysian born wife Susheela .They have a baby son Vincent and a daughter Millie and live on a working class estate in Warrington where people ordering Chinese take aways are viewed with suspicion so this family are ideal targets for the local extremists. The story moves into the 1980,s and the family have moved into a more affluent part of town yet they are still treated with wariness and more subtle and sly forms of racism as high unemployment and the menacing rise of the BNP cast a vindictive shadow over the family.
What makes this book so terrific is that Helen Walsh has not only got a pragmatic handle on these characters but also of the times they set in . The music , fashion socio-politics (It helps that Helen Walsh has led a fairly colourful life herself) are all spot on and there are helpful doses of earthy humour. The ending is tragic and moving yet importantly retains an edge of hope as Vincent claws his life back for himself. It's very rare for a book to leave me with a lump in my throat but this book did.

This Century's First Classic?
As precocious and vibrant a debut as was Helen Walsh's debut, BRASS, no reader could have guessed at or hoped for the sheer majesty of this second novel. ONCE UPON A TIME IN ENGLAND is quite possibly the first classic of the new century. Tolstoyan in its scope, yet closer in tone and theme to DH Lawrence and, perhaps more so, Dreiser's American Tragedy, Once Upon Time tackles the British multicultural experience from a completely new angle; the lone mixed-race family on a desolate, all-white Northern council estate.

Telling its story of doomed love and familial breakdown through the thoughts and voices of the four members of the Fitzgerald family, Walsh seems to suggest that in 1975, when the narrative starts out, a mixed race attraction was the love that dared not speak its name. If the novel has a narrative through line it is that young Anglo-Irish crooner Robbie Fizgerald and his Sri Lankan nurse bride Sushela ought never to have acted upon their crush. If they'd ignored it, suppressed it, looked the other way then perhaps they might have lived happily ever after. But by defying convention and, not only marrying but raising two beautiful and differently gifted children, they sentence themselves to a lifetime of defensiveness and reaction to the thoughts and deeds of their neighbours.

Sushela, a cheerful soul, soon finds herself adrift in an acquisitve 1980s Britain. Robbie, his dreams of starlight thwarted, finds consolation in his fiesty young daughter Ellie, but soon succumbs to the bottle and a series of miserable, demeaning affairs. And their bookish son Vincent finds that, no matter how advanced his reading age, his teachers will always view him as a curiosity - at best - and more often, an alien. Growing up with the aesthetic eye and wit of an outsider, Vincent's quest for happiness is perhaps the most affecting of all four beautifully wrought, though ultimately heartbroken journeys.

Once Upon A Time is not without its lighter moments. Yet even here, the comedy underpins a greater tragedy. Teetotal Sushela, hosting her first coffee morning, is asked by her Desperate Housewife neighbours if she has anything stronger than tea and coffee. Panicking, she goes out into the garage and returns with a Party Seven can of Pale Ale. In another incident, Robbie hears that Vincent has won a short-story competition. He rushes to buy the local paper and is dismayed to find that his son his swapped his Celtic surname for an exotic Sri Lankan nom-de-plume - much to the hilarity of his drinking buddies.

Little by little the Fitzgerald family fabric unravels. Each of the four harbours a guilty secret. Robbie's affairs. Ellie's embracing of ecstasy culture and the parallel demise in her school studies. Vincent begins to explore the gay tenderloin of Manchester's Canal Street area, while Sushela takes herself off to the same city to indulge a much more innocent craving... secret (and forbidden by eager-to-assimilate Robbie) curry-eating sessions in the pan-Asian Rusholme district. In concealing these secret passions from one another, the Fitzgeralds grow further apart. This is the real tragedy of the piece - together, one senses, they might have survived most trials. But disparate, they start to sink. The final beats of Vincent's story in particular are without doubt the saddest, the most powerfully affecting thing I have read in a long, long time.

Having stunned us with Vincent's downfall (is it a downfall? Perhaps it is a triumph, after all) and without succumbing to sentimentality, Walsh offers hope in the final passages. If it is possible for a heartrending episode to leave the reader uplifed, it happens here.

I'm in awe of this, the work of one the U.K's brightest young talents. It has been a while arriving, but this is, for me, the first enduring classic of this new century. If Once Upon A Time In England doesn't carry off every award going, there is something awry. Get it. Read it. Now.