Azerbaijan university of languages

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AZERBAIJAN UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Theme:
Man and Boy by Tony Parson 
 
 
 
 
BAKU-2023 

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Man and Boy by Tony Parson 
Harry Silver is a successful television producer about to turn 30. He is happily 
married, has a four-year-old son and drives a convertible sports car. Then he 
spends the night with a colleague from work and his life falls apart; his wife leaves 
him and emigrates to Japan, he loses his job and he has to cope with being a single 
parent. He also has to deal with the trauma of his father dying from cancer. While 
coping with these stresses in his life, he meets another woman at a coffee shop, a 
woman whom he has already met with her child, then they part. Harry finds a new 
job and eventually moves on with his life. This is the final instalment of the trilogy 
that began with the squillion-selling Man and Boy and continued with the merely 
hugely bestselling Man and Wife. Ten years after he first appeared, with his 
doomed first marriage and his fierce love for his son Pat, Harry Silver, Parsons's 
Everybloke hero, is enjoying life with his second wife, Cyd, the American with the 
long legs and the City catering business, and their thoroughly modern family of 
kids and stepkids. 
Pat is 15 now and having a few problems at school, where he's fallen foul of 
some bullies and in love with the no-better-than-she-should-be school beauty. 
Cyd's daughter Peggy, also 15, is wearing too-short skirts. Seven-year-old Joni 
(Cyd and Harry's daughter) is having nightmares about the Weeping Angels on 
Doctor Who. Harry's career in telly has become a job in radio (on A Clip Round 
the Ear, a grumpy-old-man show quite implausibly on Radio 2). And he's a bit 
concerned about hitting 40. But that's about it, problem-wise, as the novel opens – 
so Harry should really be bracing himself, hands over head and head between 
knees, because he should know by now that the rest of this novel is going to 
present him with relationship breakdowns, tug-of-love battles for his children, lots 
of reasons to lament "the lousy modern world" ( T Parsons) and at least one fatal 
cancer. 
And so it proves. Harry's first wife, Gina, returns from Japan, still bristling 
after all these years and newly intent on luring Pat away from Harry and into the 
little flat in Soho where she entertains her various lovers. Harry loses his job and 

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his marriage to Cyd runs into trouble, with Harry fearing that she's been lured back 
by her first husband, an impossibly handsome actor. The previous novels having 
killed off Harry's parents, the cancer is provided by Ken, a wartime mate of Harry's 
dad, who turns up out of the blue so that Harry can have a father-figure to worship 
and a deathbed to visit. 
But third time around, Harry's usual emotional predicaments have lost much 
of their power. Harry's fear of losing Pat to Gina, for example, is now tempered by 
Pat's growing independence, and his difficulties with Cyd are about as untraumatic 
as marriage problems get. But the basic problem with all the bickering with Gina 
and yearning for his boy and loyally staying by the deathbed in the oncology ward 
is that Harry has done it all before, several times. 
With the diminishing returns of a replaying storyline and a series of truly 
unconvincing crises – when Pat confronts his bully; when Harry rescues Ken's 
Victoria Cross; when Ken collapses at the dog track – it would seem that "the 
Harry Silver trilogy", as the publishers are calling it, is doomed to follow the 
traditional downward curve from initial impact to last and least. 
But no. It may lack the visceral emotional drama of Man and Boy; it may be 
repetitive of predicament; but Men from the Boys turns out to be by far the best of 
the trilogy and, indeed, by far the best book Parsons has written. That's not to say 
that there are none of Parsons' usual coincidences, abrupt melodramas and 
statements of the bleeding obvious presented as aperçus and chopped up in short, 
verbless sentences. Because there are lots of all of those. But there are also a clutch 
of excellent scenes and many times when his plain, simple style works really well, 
even stretching to some quiet and thoroughly successful flourishes. 
Even more remarkably, the irritating, simple certainties that sustained Harry 
through his trials and tribulations in the previous novels – divorce is bad, the 
wartime generation gave their all for this country – are properly challenged, as 
when Ken reminds Harry that the second world war was actually full of maiming 
and killing. Most amazingly of all, there are a scant four mentions of "the lousy 
modern world" ( T Parsons) as it dawns on Harry that the diamond geezers of his 

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father's generation weren't enviably faultless, given the emotional repression and 
rampant kiddy-fiddling of the good old days. 
Parsons's strengths have been his sincere, likeable hero and his decent bloke's 
take on the emotional dramas of contemporary family life. Harry's decency and 
likeability remain intact and, while Men from the Boys may have only just enough 
emotional drama to scrape by, it more than makes up for that with its emerging 
complexity and depth and the welcome new uncertainty of its hero. 
Tony Parsons is at the Guardian Hay festival today. Harry Ritchie's The Third 
Party is published by Hodder.