Jonah and Friends
Jonah is homeless and wanders the streets. Grateful and grumpy in turn, smiling when people give him money and scowling when they brush him aside. He’s an observer, a looker-on, and sometimes a trigger for other events. Some of these stories are about him, in others he’s just a passer-by - there fleetingly, as the people around him live out their own stories. Welcome to the world of Jonah and his ‘friends’.
Reviews for Jonah and Friends
An important and timely book.
Jonah is the common thread throughout this book of short stories. Jonah is introduced to us at the beginning of the book. Coulsdon sets the tone referring to the problem “that passers-by see only the outstretched hand and shabby clothes, they don’t see Jonah” (i.e. the human being).
In the first story, Jonah and the High Life, Robert Coulsdon’s sensitive and empathetic writing paints a picture of the back-street despair and hopelessness which characterises their lives. Yet the story ends with a touch of humour as Jonah’s insight into his situation shines through.
The writing is often both powerful and insightful as evidenced in the story, Sally, the Storekeeper’s Wife, where the sexual encounter between Sally and Maurice is drenched in disillusionment, disappointment and resentment, “his grotesque misinterpretation of her mood appalled her.”
Coulsdon has a knack of drawing in the reader so one becomes wholly invested in the various situations while maintaining an interest and awareness of Jonah as fellow onlookers.
MW
