Mike Robbins' Three Seasons is a collection of three novellas linked mainly by place and time: England in the 1980s, a decade of particular flux and instability.
Ushered in by the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the eighties in England were a time of enormous social and political change. Think riots in the inner cities, the end of punk and the rise of New Wave, the miners' strike and other bitter union struggles, and high unemployment alongside sudden new fortunes in the City.
Three men, one decade
Three Seasons is not a political book, nor is it directly about social upheaval. It tells the stories of three men whose only connection is that they live in England at the same time. Each short novel offers a snapshot of a life, and each manages something many longer novels attempt and miss: it tells an individual story while capturing the spirit of a particular moment. That spirit is integral to the stories, though it is rarely spelled out.
- Spring follows a middle-aged man who feels that life no longer has much to offer him.
- Summer sees a young man trying to make his fortune in property.
- Autumn is about a professor forced by events in his present to look hard at his past.
Taken together, the novellas evoke what a turning point the 1980s were. A man who is stuck, a man charging forward without a thought for how his actions affect others, and a man brooding on how things used to be stand in for the mood of the time.
The great eighties gamble
"Summer" is the most vivid of the three, and the one that will strike a chord with anyone who remembers the boom. Its hero treats the housing market the way a high roller treats a hot roulette table: borrow, buy, flip and let it ride. Robbins understands that the decade's real casino was not on the Strip but in estate agents' windows and on the trading floors after the 1986 "Big Bang" deregulation of the City. Readers who enjoy that atmosphere of easy money and sudden reversals might pair it with the gamblers in our Casino Novels section.
Characters who embody an era
The novellas work because Robbins writes characters who are dimensional, complicated and engaging. In one respect they recall George Babbitt, the Sinclair Lewis character who came to symbolise a type of American man in the 1920s. They have little else in common with Babbitt, but like him they embody the spirit of a time and place. Writing absorbing stories with layered characters while also creating such a strong sense of an era takes real talent.
About Mike Robbins
Mike Robbins is a former journalist and development worker who has also written travel memoirs and other fiction. He grew up in England and has lived and worked in many countries, including Sudan, Syria and Bhutan.
