After weeks of reading Dennis Cooper, Joan Didion, introductory philosophy texts, I needed something to lighten the mood. I hadn’t heard a thing about Paul Magrs’ Exchange and only picked it up because of an intriguing cover, a collection of colourful letters smashing up against each other. Discovering that an exchange bookstore was a main feature of the novel was more than enough to entice me. However, for all the appropriately bibliophilic tendencies Exchange evokes, the main story is something of a disappointment, almost undoing all the joy to be found in the young character’s love of books.
Simon has moved to a small country town to live with his grandparents after the tragic death of his parents. Unusually unlike most other protagonists of young adult fiction, the still grieving Simon is quiet, awkward, self-conscious, without whipsmart comebacks to the taunts of the local lads. At first the heavy use of British slang – lots of lads and dafts – grated, but gradually faded in to the background. A fervent reader, Simon and his grandmother, Winnie, bond through a love of charity store book shopping and reading, a passion his surly grandfather doesn’t share.
The saving grace of the drab charity shops would be the inevitable shelves of paperbacks. This was the cheapest way to buy books, and he liked how they were jumbled together: ancient classics cheek by jowl with recent popular blockbusters; westerns and romances; fantasy and stark, searing realism. The erratic order of things exactly reflected his own reading habits and the almost random way he chose what would take up his attention next.
By chance, Simon and Winnie happen upon an exchange bookstore, manned by the artificially limbed (yes, really) Terrence and confident goth girl Kelly. Winnie discovers a book written by an old childhood friend about their lives growing up together and the narrative sometimes diverges into stories about Winnie and Ada’s past, leading up to a feelgood reunion. Simon too strikes up a friendship with Kelly, that borders on the romantic but due to Simon’s awkwardness is never quite able to move beyond friendship. Just as I was warming to the bibliophilia present in Exchange, enjoying long passages of the simple pleasures of reading and drinking tea, I stupidly read the back cover again which referred to “a terrible act of revenge.” Though it wasn’t evident in the style, story or structure itself, this knowledge filled me with a sense of dread. The story was so gentle, so peacefully quiet that I became anxious about what would happen to Simon and/or Winnie.
“Yes. It seems wrong, somehow, to get rid of books. You need them. They’ll remind you of who you are. And where you’ve been. And you’ll need them even more, when everything is changing…”
From there, and not just because of my rather unfounded dread, the story falls apart. Yet, I can’t really pinpoint exactly why. It could be that the story doesn’t particularly go anywhere, and there is no recognizable change or evolution within the characters. There seems to be the faint suggestion that reading is just a way of avoiding confrontation with real, abject feeling – whether grief, unhappiness or jealousy – which I do not agree with it. The final half of Exchange is uninteresting despite the interesting premise, and denies the pleasure that Simon, and surely the reader, takes in books and reading.
2006, August 2010, book review, Exchange, fiction, Paul Magrs
I disagree that the final half of Exchange is uninteresting. I believe that the first quarter of Exchange was less interesting, as not much happens, and the real story (in my eyes) doesn’t start until later.