Review of Becoming Henry, by Graham Strugnell, pub. Constellations Press 2025

[sheenaghpugh]

Thank you, dear,’ she said, the way adults did when they thanked you for something that hadn’t really helped and that they hadn’t really wanted.

This is a coming-of-age novel, the progress of the eponymous Henry through the sixties and seventies, from birth to leaving for an unspecified university. It is written in close third person, and almost all from Henry’s point of view.

A child’s-eye view can give a fresh outlook on things, because their perspective is so different from an adult one. They observe in a way adults seldom do – “the mangle, a strange thing that looked alive and sad and whose rubber lips were chapped and perished” – and their sense of priorities and realities is different, as becomes apparent when a sudden accidental death happens at Henry’s primary school. The adults are horrified, but the children sharing the news, “smiled, because deaths never happened at boring old school, and it was exciting and not quite real, like something in a story or film”.

They also tend to be solipsistic, and Henry is no exception. He is not particularly likeable or dislikeable, more your average ordinary child morphing into your average whiny. self-obsessed, self-pitying teenager. Indeed a key moment in his development is when he briefly contemplates suicide, for no better reason than that a girl he’s only just met has refused to go out with him, but is distracted by a phone call from a friend. Afterwards, returning to the pills he has collected: “he stared at them for a while and tried to remember how he’d been feeling before the phone call but could not. Then he picked up the pills and went back to his mum’s room, replacing them in her medicine bag. Back in his room, he re-read his note and shook his head, as Mr Muldoon would have done, at the hackneyed phrasing. Then he tore the note into small pieces, and put them carefully in the bin.”

Henry’s viewpoint is challenging, both for the writer and any adult reader, because we can share, as Henry at the time cannot, the adult viewpoints that baffle him as a child and annoy him as an adolescent. It may be particularly challenging for a female reader, because part of Henry’s trouble, in his own mind, is that he is male. His father does not provide the kind of male role model he wants, and he feels his mother prefers his sisters and sees his masculinity as a nuisance: “‘Why can’t you be more like your sisters?’ she said, waving her duster, a technicolour nylon thing on a stick, as if she would dust him out of existence, or at least, into femininity”.

An adult reader can see that this may not be what she means at all, and can also see that Henry’s resentment at his sisters “getting away” with things at certain times stems from his total inability to appreciate how enervating the onset of menstruation can be: “They were girls; they had strange fits of weakness where all that would console them was cake and music and cartoons on TV. Henry knew then that girls would always get away with things that he couldn’t, and that, all things considered, he would have been better off born female.” But though the first reaction of a female reader to this whinge may be pardonable irritation, it is illuminating and thought-provoking to see how things look to him, and perhaps to boys in general.

Henry grows up in the 60s and 70s, which makes him about 10 years younger than me. For the most part, I think the evocation of the time period is convincing without looking over-researched. The obsession of Henry’s mother with class and her horror of anything “common” ring very true for the time, as does the gradual change in dietary habits: “You should never invert your fork and shovel in food as if it were coal going into a boiler. Holding your fork that way was only acceptable if you moved it to your right hand and were eating spaghetti Bolognese, which you sprinkled with a thin dusty cheese called Parmesan, that smelled faintly of vomit. The smell made it sophisticated and more Italian, his mother said. Sophisticated meant eating food that was slightly disgusting. This food was what was called an acquired taste.” Only at two points did I feel “hang on, it wasn’t like that”. One was when we hear that Henry and his sisters, as teens, liked The Waltons. Now admittedly it is hard to judge, because I was a teenager in the 60s, which were more rebellious and cynical than the 70s, and it’s also possible that because of the Vietnam war, we were more anti-American than the next wave of teens, but I recall The Waltons (first broadcast 1972) as the sort of squeaky-clean programme one’s parents liked, which pretty much made it anathema; I can’t imagine teenagers of any time watching it unless to mock.

The other point that puzzled me was the indifference of Henry’s teenage schoolmates to events in the wider world: “Outside the window, the other world was still there. It was a world of power cuts, and punk; a world of strikes and the IRA. Bombs were everywhere: in pubs, letters, packages, carrier bags, pillar boxes; in tube stations, trains and litter bins. There were firebombs and nail bombs, car bombs and boat bombs. All this was in the air and on the radio and on the TV in the living room, but the boys hadn’t been taught to take an interest, and these events might as well have been happening in another country.” I went to the same kind of school as Henry (except that mine was co-ed) and I remember heated conversations in the playground about current events. Again, this may point to a difference between the two decades: maybe the space race, swinging London and the 1968 assassinations in the USA were just more interesting, but one would have thought the IRA bombs at least would have held their attention.

The author’s wry, observational tone can often be very funny, and he is good at pinpointing a character. The foibles of Henry’s mother make an especially good target: “She believed in extra sensory perception and sometimes exclaimed when she turned on the radio, because the song she’d been humming in her head was playing right now, and that just showed you, didn’t it?”  Not that Henry himself escapes: “He’d begun drinking coffee because he believed doing so made him an intellectual. In fact, it only succeeded in making him jittery and giving him heartburn, but still, he thought, one must suffer for one’s art.”

In many ways, this is an ambitious first novel – set in a past many can still recall, seen through a child’s eyes – and one of the most ambitious things about it is its choice of a really quite ordinary boy as protagonist. Henry’s progress toward being adult, male and reasonably comfortable in his skin is not that of someone in any way remarkable but of Everyman, which makes it the more interesting and meaningful.