Search Over

SEARCH OVER Sex and Love by ELIOT GEORGE is the third in the ’David quartet’ of which the first was SEARCH FOR THE WOMAN Sex and Satisfaction. Now in middle age and retired early from full-time work in the Nineties, David leaves England to live abroad in more congenial climes. This book (set in Angeles City, Philippines and England) follows his continued search for sex and love, for the woman and for wider happiness. The series traces the life and adventures of David from the end of the Second World War when he was a six-month-old baby through astonishing social and political changes. His experiences as a working-class boy who makes good thus parallel those of the modern world to the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when he is in healthy late middle age. In particular, David tries to make sense of the Battle of the Sexes during that time, in a world of increasingly inverted sense. (A fifth book, as prequel, will describe growing up in post-war Britain through the Forties, Fifties and Sixties.} The first book SEARCH FOR THE WOMAN (Sex and Satisfaction) tells the story of a romance through the social history of the Seventies, a time with particular resonance to the Noughties. It is also a powerful polemic, told with humour and (at times, brutal) realism of a world that is increasingly emasculated. The inspirations are ’A Kind of Loving’ mixed with ’Fever Pitch’ and a more realistic male version of ’Bridget Jones’. The style resembles Hemingway, punchy and pithy, in old-fashioned formal yet street-wise English. Although written in fictionalized form, every word is true. The opinions expressed are those of real people, not bland single-ideology politically correct cyphers. The series of novels brings to life Andrew Marr’s ’History of Modern Britain’ showing what it was really like to live through those times. In addition, it puts the flesh of personal experience on the academic bones of Robin Baker’s ’Sperm Wars’.