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Past Caring

By: Robert Goddard
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Corgi Books
ISBN: 055213144X
ISBN-13: 9780552131445
Released: 17 Jul 1987
RRP: £7.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

never wanted it to end - By: SWH, 25 Feb 2008
when I finished this book I threw it across the room in anger. I wanted to know more & more. A Goddard book is a journey, an adventure. I happily went along. But I couldn't leave the house until I was done reading it. The voices of the flawed narrators are compelling. In particular - take a look at what he does with Aubrey... a cypher made flesh. Wonderful.
One of Robert Goddard's best - By: Philippe Horak, 28 Oct 2007
Martin Redford is an unemployed & divorced ex-schoolteacher of foundered promise & dismal prospect. So when Alec Fowler suggests that Martin comes to visit him on the island of Madeira with the promise of a prospective job offered by his South African friend Leo Sellick, he eagerly accepts.
It turns out that when Sellick became the owner of his house, the Quinta do Porto Novo, he came across a manuscript written by its previous owner, Edwin Strafford. Strafford had been appointed Home Secretary in 1908 at the age of thirty-two. Why did he resign two years later without explanation before becoming British Consul on Madeira? Why was he abruptly rejected by his fiancée, suffragette Elizabeth Latimer? Who or what betrayed Edwin Strafford in 1910? It is going to be a twisty path for Martin Redford, now Leo Sellick's employee, to find the answers to these questions & many others.
A good plot & a sound historical background are the qualities of this entertaining adventure story. Paul Shelley is the excellent reader of this novel for BBC Audiobooks.
Rivetting - By: John Deighan, 29 Sep 2007
I loved this book. I couldn't put it down for the first 400 pages. There are however more than 500 pages, the last of these seemed a bit of an anticlimax. Perhaps I'd been emotionallly drained by then. By this point however the mystery which compels you to keep reading has been revealed. Goddard seems to struggle to bring it alll to a satisfactory end but don't let that put you off reading this excellent novel. I could have happily stopped contented at what Goddard achieves before the last fifth of the book.
Past Caring - By: Di, 30 Jul 2007
His best book ever. Wish somebody would bring out a cd instead of a tape.
First novel by a fine storyteller - By: Budge Burgess, 29 Jul 2005
A down at heel, disreputable former teacher is enlisted to research a mystery which has spanned the first half of the 20th century ... & beyond. As he delves into the past, his own failures come back to haunt him. It seemed, at first, to be an excuse for a bit of a jaunt & a chance to earn some spare cash; it quickly turns into a real mystery in which the teacher must anticipate threats to his own life & the total disruption of his world.

Robert Goddard does an excellent job of taking the Liberal Government's pre-World War One constitutional crisis & making it the backdrop for his mystery. Prime Minister Asquith is not one of the most memorable of British politicians, & the crisis occasioned by Lloyd George's welfare policies is forgotten by alll but those few historians specialising in the era.

Goddard, nevertheless, brings it alive & makes it both comprehensible to the non-historian & relevant to the plot. Using themes of political rivalry between Asquith, Lloyd George, & Churchill, & the radical intervention of the Suffragette movement, he constructs a highly entertaining page-turner of a novel.

He handles the exposition of the history very well. This is no fluffy 'costume drama': the themes of rivalry, jealousy, intrigue, & political manipulation are timeless, & Goddard sets them up neatly & convincingly.

His hero is flawed. He has a past ... he seems unlikely to have a future. He's no conventional thriller hero - if it came to a fight between him & an aged nun, I'd put my money on the nun. He is, effectively, a nondescript little bourgeois with contacts from his Cambridge days - he has alll the social graces & some of their advantages, but he's squandered his opportunities because of his flawed character.

Goddard develops his unheroic hero quite well - this is Goddard's first novel, in later books his characterisation becomes more acutely constructed & managed. If there is a fault in this work, however, it is in the dialogue, which can be a bit sterile. Virtuallly alll the characters talk with the same voice - polite, Oxbridge tones with little real emotion & much elaborated rationalisation.

Nevertheless, it's a very good tale, well told (in the main), and, like alll good first novels, it's a useful yardstick against which to measure the writer's emergent talent. I interviewed Goddard some years ago. He's a very pleasant, articulate, knowledgeable, & likeable man - you suspect an evening in his company over a few beers would be highly entertaining. He also writes exceedingly good thrillers - very English (as a Scot, I do not always use this as a derogatory term), with an enthrallling ability to grasp history & relate it to the present.

Excellent, enjoyable page-turner of a novel. Like alll Goddard's works, a fine book to take away with you for a weekend or to accompany you on a long plane or train journey while an expert storyteller transports you into another world.