A novel about the comedy of spiralling
Third novel, as if from nowhere.
When I was teaching creative writing at Cardiff University, one of the first things we used to instruct students was in getting into the habit of keeping a notebook. Now, the truth is, nowadays, notes of ideas can be kept in any number of digital or electronic formats (I do that myself now), but I now have a working lived experience of how a notebook can emerge directly into a living, breathing book.
The story of Angels of Cairo is also a story of lockdown.
Easiest way to explain this is to start with the blurb.
Lewis has written a script. Eighty pages in ten days. Hardly slept... He taps the bag on his shoulder with a delicate fingertip like it’s a hot kettle. Cliff is then given ten minutes on the problem with Lewis’s printer. Then the history of problems with his printer. Then problems with printers more generally...
Robert Clifford is in Cairo to present his latest film for a festival prize. It has taken seven gruelling years of his life to make and is definitely NOT a film about his mother. But his moment in the spotlight is not quite as he scripted. There are rumours the jury could be influenced. Nobody can lay their hands on a copy of the film. And even his girlfriend thinks it’s about his mother.
Cliff’s producer has not turned up but sent his nephew Lewis Proudfoot instead. Lewis has a script of his own to sell and is determined that everyone should hear about it. Then a meeting is arranged with a group of the festival organiser’s friends, who may or may not be revolutionaries...
Angels of Cairo is a fast-moving, acerbic comedy told over a single day but capturing a lifetime of angst and self-doubt.
In January 2020, I was in Cairo as a guest of the Egyptian publisher and Arabic translators of my second novel The Golden Orphans. It was a heady trip. I made what I discovered later, back in Wales under lockdown, around 10,000 words of notes on the trip whilst out there. Lockdown meant that I had a bit of time on my hands (this was before my son was born, of course). I typed up the notes into a sort of short story, and finding it a very entertaining comedy story I emailed it to my publisher in Wales, Parthian, entirely because we were all experiencing the End Times and I knew Richard Davies, CEO of Parthian, having been to a thousand book fairs in his time, would find the story funny too. His response was to say that if I could turn it into a full length novel he would like to publish it. And the rest, as they say, was hard bloody work.
But from a most unexpected place, and most definitely not what I was planning to do next (lord knows what I was actually planning) Angels of Cairo became my third novel, released in 2021.
And although, as with my other lockdown book, it didn’t quite get the traction I had hoped for, it had some lovely things said about it.
NEW COMIC NOVEL BY THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE GOLDEN ORPHANS
WATERSTONES WELSH BOOK OF THE MONTH JULY 2021
"Freewheeling, spiky and laugh-out-loud funny, Raymond's giddy comedy of angst-ridden filmmakers adrift in the heat of Cairo fizzes with one-liners and exquisitely constructed set-pieces." - Waterstones
"Raymond conjures wisdom and warmth from the impending disaster of a day in Cairo... his protagonist struggling to pull off the launching of his film after years of work and compromise, while his father is dying back home in England. The tensions are painful, the twists and turns are sudden and unexpected, the characters are acutely observed and infuriating. I read to the end with a welling of good feeling for the film-maker, feeling for him all the way and wishing him well. An exhausting day in Cairo, a book full of wisdom and wit and warmth..." - Stephen Gregory
"Gary Raymond’s latest book, Angels of Cairo, is a taut and very funny cautionary tale about the perils of creative obsession, set over one nail-biting day of angst and self-discovery." New Welsh Review
"Angels of Cairo is an artfully constructed tale of anxiety and impending doom" Nation.Cymru
"Gary Raymond is a brilliantly funny writer and this book is arguably his best yet." Jenny White, The Western Mail
If this takes your fancy - a dark comic novel - then the best place to get it is via the publisher’s website, but it is available in all the other usual places.
