Patrick Dransfield’s Troutfishing on the Tees: Me and Tony Blair is a sprawling comic novel about work, masculinity and political disillusionment in the North East at the turn of the millennium. Its hero, Dr Steve Hemmings, is an intelligent but spectacularly unself-aware chemical-industry manager whose life revolves around corporate advancement, amateur cricket, unsuccessful romance and an increasingly fanciful correspondence with Tony Blair. Steve’s employer, BCG, is undergoing the kind of “restructuring” that everyone understands except him, while his beloved Outcasts cricket club is consumed by petty feuds and rigged elections. These parallel worlds give the book its shape. Both are institutions in decline, both reward the wrong people, and both use pompous procedures to disguise personal agendas.

Much of the pleasure comes from the book’s crowded social world. Geoff, the manipulative Outcasts chairman, is a wonderfully relentless companion, while Karen, Paula, Stuart, Debbie, Amir and the canteen “Septics” keep exposing different sides of Steve’s character. He can be vain, crude and maddeningly selfish, particularly in his treatment of women, yet he’s also creative, vulnerable and capable of recognizing the absurdity of corporate life. The running jokes about the elusive company car, health and safety rules, management jargon, sexual frustration and the club’s dreaded potty award create a distinctive rhythm. Dransfield also has an excellent ear for workplace speech, especially the way redundancies become “transition” and genuine problems disappear beneath talk of synergies, innovation and personal development.

Steve often resembles an adult, more sexually preoccupied cousin of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole. Like Mole, he records his habits and ambitions with solemn confidence while revealing far more than he intends, and both characters imagine a special connection to major political figures. The comparison is especially apt because Townsend used private vanity to capture public moods. Dransfield does something similar with New Labour Britain, filtering deindustrialization, managerial culture and regional neglect through one man’s complaints and delusions. His approach is broader, bawdier and more densely packed with cricket lore, popular music and Teesside references. The songs, news stories and political events fix the novel firmly in 2000, giving it the feel of a comic social archive as well as a character study.

The novel’s abundance is both its signature and its main challenge. Scenes often expand into extended routines, and the accumulation of sexual jokes, digressions and historical asides can make the middle feel episodic. Yet that excess also makes Steve’s world convincing. His distractions keep him from grasping the danger gathering around him. When BCG finally declares him surplus to requirements and his supposed bond with Blair collapses, the book’s comedy turns sharply into tragedy. The ending is deliberately brutal, and the epilogue widens Steve’s fate into an angry argument about lost manufacturing jobs, weakened communities and a political movement that learned to speak the language of ordinary workers while accepting their disposability. That final turn gives the earlier farce a bitter aftertaste and makes Steve more than a comic embarrassment. He becomes a messy, memorable casualty of his place and time.

Pages: 352 | ISBN: 1068251905