"The problem with tents...is that they don't have windows. Once you've zipped up, you have no viewpoint upon the world." - Rated 
August, the first book in Woodward's Aldous Jones trilogy, introduces the Jones family in 1955, when Aldous Rex Llewellyn Jones and his wife Colette are a happy, young married couple with two young children. By 1970, the family, now numbering four children, is facing a series of crises, many of their own making. Author Gerard Woodward, an author who captures scenes and thoughts in unusually vibrant prose filled with unique images and observations, focuses on the domestic life of this family and its interactions, both within the family and within their social milieu.
During the fifteen years of this novel, the Jones family vacations during the month of August in a tent on farmer Hugh Evans's farm in Llanygwynfa, Wales, each chapter representing a different year in the family's life. Life in the tent becomes a microcosm for Woodward's careful examination of family dynamics and change, as the inner lives of the characters are explored in detail. Aldous is an artist and teacher whose education has been subsidized by Lesley Waugh, the brother of Colette, whom Aldous eventually marries. Colette is the primary care giver for Nana, her (and Lesley's) senile mother. Since her siblings feel unable to care for their mother, Colette sometimes has difficulty escaping for a vacation, and on one occasion, she is forced to put her mother into a nursing home.
Janus Jones, Aldous and Colette's eldest son, is brilliant, a boy who eventually develops into a talented student at the Royal Academy of Music. Despite his talent, he remains unsure of his long-term career path. His traumas, his lack of confidence, and his uncertainty about his sexuality color the family dynamics throughout much of the novel, leading to innumerable confrontations. The other children--James, Juliette, and young Julian, sixteen years younger than Janus--pretty much fend for themselves during the crises, occasionally creating issues of their own. Colette escapes into her own world. Ultimately, Aldous must decide whether to continue to vacation in farmer Evans's field or whether that phase of their family life is over.
The novel differs from most other studies of dysfunctional families because the writing is so compelling--filled with thoughtful descriptions, unique imagery, and careful observations, every word perfect. And even though the focus is firmly domestic, without much focus on the world at large (except as the family represents universal problems of all families), Woodward wields his pen like a stiletto, cutting to the quick and exposing the innermost thoughts and feelings of the characters, often with dark humor. While the final novel of the trilogy, A Curious Earth, contains much more wry humor and often comes close to being laugh-out-loud funny, August introduces the characters, makes them "real," and firmly establishes Woodward as one of the premier prose stylists writing today. n Mary Whipple
I'll Go to Bed at Noon
Painfully sad, artistically uplifting - Rated 
So many books these days start brightly, only to wither into pale, limping things you can't be bothered with. 'August' is a notable exception. Set mostly in the 60s, it charts the sad decline of a family, as addiction, mental illness and conflict tear them apart. It's a challenging book to read. The mother, Colette, is a pioneer of substance abuse, and the eldest son, Janus, exhibits very disturbed behaviour, especially towards his mother. Some readers might be shocked or disgusted, but others will be powerfully moved. There's a sharp, almost visceral, pain to some of the observations: "Janus could have been there [on holiday with his father], but not the boy he remembered. Not the bright, fair-headed, fringed, eager to please child, but the man only last Christmas he'd punched in the face." (It's not a book to read when feeling fragile...)
Funny, horrific and poignant in equal parts, it's brilliantly sustained. The device of structuring the plot around annual holidays to the same field in Wales is a clever one, making the lurch from early idyll to later dysfunction all the more shocking. Some of the contrasts are harrowing: when Colette arrives for the final holiday, her former energy and exuberance have been replaced by drug-damaged confusion and frailty, and it's hard not to feel saddened, whatever you think about the neglect of her children.
It eventually becomes almost ghoulishly addictive, like the glue Colette inhales. But I didn't find it a gloomy read, and it's lightened by the fact that Woodward writes the most amazing prose, with a very visual way of describing things: a London bus, reversing out of its bay in a depot, "unslots itself like a volume from a shelf of red diaries". For an author of such impressive ability, however, there are some extremely clumsy and confusing sentences, and at times peculiar word order that reads as though it's been written by Yoda from Star Wars: ("Gradually Christine as a living presence faded..."). The punctuation's pretty awful, too. So five stars for an absolutely engrossing read that impressed and moved me in equal measure, but a big raspberry to Vintage Books for their contemptuously careless editing and proof-reading. (Where have I come across that before?)
Shocking and funny - Rated
What a wonderful novel. This is the story of a family's annual holidays to Wales over a period of almost 20 years, and how the family grow and change during this time. It does not have a conventionally linear plot, rather a year's events are described in each chapter, and a lot happens.
Two things which stand out for me and make this a great novel:
1. Fantastic imagery. Woodward applies his poetic language to ordinary things we are all familiar. So when a phrase resonates with the reader, which for me it did all the time, it does so with a double whammy, once for the beauty of the language, and a second time, with the recognition of familiar things described. And this makes for powerful writing indeed.
2. Brilliantly drawn characters. Woodward's characters are warm and loving, yet at times violent, given over to addictions and lack professional ambition. Yet although deeply flawed when judged by today's morality, even in their most outrageous moments Woodward is not judgemental towards them, and manages to convey feelings of love and respect towards them which is contagious. You wouldn't expect to empathise with a middle-aged glue-sniffer, but you do, even as you wish her to stop harming herself.
Add to the above a setting so well observed you can taste it (1960s and 1970s London), and the result convinces that Woodward is a master of his craft. I hope he produces more books now that the trilogy is completed.
Strange Glue - Rated
This was Gerard Woodward's first novel, after three award-winning collections of poetry, but from his mastery of the form anyone would think he had a dozen novels under his belt. The loving but troubled Jones family, complete with Mum who sniffs glue and unstable eldest son Janus who fixes his pencil sketches of trees to the wall of the Tate Gallery with drawing pins, are vividly drawn and unforgettable characters. Woodward shows a born novelist's skill in the way he carefully elides whole sections of the Jones' narrative, skipping a couple of years and only gradually revealing crucial information to the reader in retrospect. At the same time, it's a poet's book as well: almost every paragraph has some striking (though often unlikely) image or some felicitous use of language to capture the reader's attention. The basic premise is so simple that it's difficult to believe no-one has used it before: Woodward centres the novel around the Jones' annual fortnight's holiday in 1960s rural Wales, only gradually allowing the details of the family's normal working life in London to emerge. As for so many families, the annual Big Holiday has a special importance for all of the Joneses: because they always go to the same part of Wales, it has become a sort of spiritual homeland to them, viewed with almost mythical significance. (For instance, when a window is broken in a drunken family brawl towards the end of the novel, it gets patched with one of Dad's paintings of Wales - a minor but telling detail.) When Aldous Jones first discovers the perfect spot for a family camping holiday after a bicycle accident, the early holidays with his young wife Colette and their steadily growing family are portrayed in glowing prose as an extended rural idyll. However, things very quickly darken and start to complicate as the years roll by: Woodward has eyes in the back of his head for the crocodiles lurking beneath the apparently tranquil surface of family life. Troubled by her mother's death and by the skeletons in her own family closet, Colette develops an unlikely but entirely convincing fondness for sniffing glue - this in an era when solvent abuse was an unheard-of oddity. Tellingly, again, her favourite sniff is the bicycle glue from Aldous' puncture repair kit. Brilliant but mildly unhinged eldest lad Janus also quickly slides off the rails, and by the end of the book the initial idyll is sliding towards nightmare. Yet Woodward always emphasises that the Joneses (with the exception of Janus, who has real difficulties in relating to other people at all) are very much a loving family. This is what is so disturbing about the book, and what makes it such a fine and original novel: Woodward carefully dissects the tangled and cloying relationships of love and obligation between the family members, and shows how easily they change from something that keeps the family strong into something that is ultimately entrapping and destructive. A bit like glue, come to think of it.
A muddled wander through life with the Jones family. - Rated 
I'm really not sure what all the hype is about. I bought this book on holiday. I finished it because I had nothing else to read. However it is not the page-turner that makes you feel you don't want to leave the book. Far too many descriptions for my liking. Ending doesn't really happen, the book just stops. To be honest the book feels like it has been written with a set of dice. My verdict - don't bother unless you like weighty descriptions of madness.
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