Falling Through

Who is that man peering through an iron telescope outside Alexandra Palace? Ray Davies? Matthew Arnold? Graham Greene? Graham Bartlett travels to his mystery assignations with teenagers, and for a few quid improves their GCSE homework. What led him to this lonely, peripatetic existence? Years earlier he had lived in various other guises, half-remembered as he criss-crosses swathes of suburban north London. Murders are committed. Riots explode. Model gliders are launched. Lovers part. Graham continues doggedly on his rounds, finding sustenance in his glancing encounters with real and imagined others. Turks. Africans. West Indians. Kosovans. Falling Through is a haunted, darkly funny portrayal of a side of London that hasn’t often found its way into fiction.