Alan Franks
Writer and musician
Writer and musician
The Sins of the Sons
It is the very early Sixties in suburban England. The Twist, the latest dance craze, has just arrived from America and is taking Britain by storm. Social conventions are under attack as never before as the waltz and foxtrot are barged aside by the invasion. In this new world of undreamed possibilities and terrified parents two thirteen-year-old boys, Danny and Oliver, find themselves the victims of an evil hoax by fellow pupils at the ballroom classes. With all the authority figures taking the side of the persecutors, the episode spirals out of control with tragic consequences that follow everyone down the years; none more so than Danny, whose life is given over to revenge.
This is a blazing and passionate story about the losing of innocence and the bitter gaining of adulthood. It is also a painfully acute account of a young man’s attempts to redeem himself from the ravages of guilt. In Franks’s darkly comic and beautifully made story, we meet a Dickensian gallery of the sinful and the saintly: the Gilberbykes, a nightmare family of civic snobs; Oliver’s extraordinary but difficult father, Benny Jacobs; the eccentric sculptor Seth Rawlings and countless others, each luminously brought to life by his poetic imagination. There are gilded entrepreneurs, divine musicians, pub shysters and middle-class vagrants in a teeming world that has seen off the upheavals of war but is now struggling with its own reinvention. As it makes its shocking and often farcical way towards the truth, The Sins of the Sons is not just a vivid social history of a fleeting time but also a profound study of what we pay to put the past in its place.
Alan Franks is an award-winning author and poet. His fiction includes Boychester’s Bugle, a classic comedy about newspapers and the technological revolution, and Going Over, which won first prize in the National Novella Competition of 2003. Among his many plays are The Mother Tongue, starring Prunella Scales and Gwen Taylor; Previous Convictions, a comedy about Baby Boomers grown old, and The Edge of the Land, set in East Anglia in the great floods of 1953. His poems have won several prizes, including the inaugural Wigtown Competition, Scotland’s largest, and a volume of his work, Unmade Roads, was published this year by Muswell Press. He gives regular performances of his poems and songs, and has released four albums with the singer Patty Vetta. One of the songs, “The Wishfulness Waltz,” became the title track of a CD by the veteran folk-rock band Fairport Convention. Franks has written for The Times for more thirty years, covering a broad range of topics and interviewing major figures from the worlds of music, literature and the performing arts. In the 1980s he wrote a column, “Alan Franks’s Diary,” which was published as the book Real Life With Small Children Underfoot, and read by him as a Radio 4 series. He has twice been nominated for a British Press Award.
What they said about Boychester’s Bugle:
“Brilliantly comic.”
Novelist Tom Sharpe
“A very funny blackish comedy about the introduction of new technology.”
Alan Hollinghurst, The Observer
“sharply satirical… a sting in every paragraph.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Alan Franks writes now in the style of Flann O’Brien, now in that of the young Kingsley Amis… a very odd, brave novel.”
This is a blazing and passionate story about the losing of innocence and the bitter gaining of adulthood. It is also a painfully acute account of a young man’s attempts to redeem himself from the ravages of guilt. In Franks’s darkly comic and beautifully made story, we meet a Dickensian gallery of the sinful and the saintly: the Gilberbykes, a nightmare family of civic snobs; Oliver’s extraordinary but difficult father, Benny Jacobs; the eccentric sculptor Seth Rawlings and countless others, each luminously brought to life by his poetic imagination. There are gilded entrepreneurs, divine musicians, pub shysters and middle-class vagrants in a teeming world that has seen off the upheavals of war but is now struggling with its own reinvention. As it makes its shocking and often farcical way towards the truth, The Sins of the Sons is not just a vivid social history of a fleeting time but also a profound study of what we pay to put the past in its place.
Alan Franks is an award-winning author and poet. His fiction includes Boychester’s Bugle, a classic comedy about newspapers and the technological revolution, and Going Over, which won first prize in the National Novella Competition of 2003. Among his many plays are The Mother Tongue, starring Prunella Scales and Gwen Taylor; Previous Convictions, a comedy about Baby Boomers grown old, and The Edge of the Land, set in East Anglia in the great floods of 1953. His poems have won several prizes, including the inaugural Wigtown Competition, Scotland’s largest, and a volume of his work, Unmade Roads, was published this year by Muswell Press. He gives regular performances of his poems and songs, and has released four albums with the singer Patty Vetta. One of the songs, “The Wishfulness Waltz,” became the title track of a CD by the veteran folk-rock band Fairport Convention. Franks has written for The Times for more thirty years, covering a broad range of topics and interviewing major figures from the worlds of music, literature and the performing arts. In the 1980s he wrote a column, “Alan Franks’s Diary,” which was published as the book Real Life With Small Children Underfoot, and read by him as a Radio 4 series. He has twice been nominated for a British Press Award.
What they said about Boychester’s Bugle:
“Brilliantly comic.”
Novelist Tom Sharpe
“A very funny blackish comedy about the introduction of new technology.”
Alan Hollinghurst, The Observer
“sharply satirical… a sting in every paragraph.”
Times Literary Supplement
“Alan Franks writes now in the style of Flann O’Brien, now in that of the young Kingsley Amis… a very odd, brave novel.”