Forces of nature
By: Nicholas Salaman.
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Published: 1989
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 183
First sentence: It was raining. The road was as dark and shiny as the black pudding Freddie had seen someone eating for breakfast in the hotel near Matlock.
Description: 'Tampering with the springs of life', was the Headmaster's way of putting it, but adolescent tumescence was only one of the problems confronting Freddie Pemberton at the guesthouse on the shores of Lake Ettenwater.  Others were Bertrand, the French boy his mother had foisted on him for two weeks of his precious holidays while she and his stepfather revelled in Scotland; the endless Lakeland rain; a warring yet insidiously fascinating couple, old friends of the Pemberton family, who lived in a country house nearby; a rumoured water monster in the lake itself; encounters in a secret passage with a sexually precocious Diana; a distantly looming Wordsworth exam; goatsmilk; and love and deception in the bittersweet land of lost discontent of the 1950's.  The novel draws to its conclusion with a magnificently comic climax in which Nicholas Salaman once again shows his special fascination with the perils of growing up.