Book Review - The Boys

Set in London, during the 2012 Olympics, Leo Robson’s debut explores the relationship between two brothers. Johnny Voghel is grieving the death of his mother. He has a dull administrative job at the West Midland former polytechnic where he studied, and is debating whether to end his relationship with his girlfriend.

During the holidays he returns to the family home he’s inherited in Swiss Cottage and hangs out with his friend Kate. When his idolised, older half-brother Lawrence returns from Chicago after a long period away, Johnny is delighted and we follow the brothers over the two-week duration of the Olympics as they reconnect with each other, meet old friends and cultivate new relationships. Through a series of long flashbacks we learn something of the family’s history: Lawrence’s fraught relationship with their mother, his first girlfriend, Emily, and the reasons he left London are narrated from Johnny’s perspective.

Robson, an award-winning journalist, essayist, and a literary and cultural critic, brilliantly captures Johnny’s interior world; his lack of ambition, confusion and inability to commit to relationships. Lawrence is less well-defined, more a type - “Too late for punk, too soon for tech” - rather than a fully-formed character. The exposition about their parents’ past (while fascinating) detracts from the first-person, present-tense narrative, and Robson’s disjointed chronology occasionally makes the family’s complex web of relationships hard to follow.

Essentially a London novel, Robson touches on the euphoria and optimism surrounding the Olympics, while Britain’s economic outlook was resolutely austere: “a New Labour baby delivered by Tories” The games quickly fade into the background as the various characters become embroiled in their personal lives, attending house parties, contemplating uncertain futures, and glumly predicting that “the only legacy of these Olympics will be…T-shirts, backpacks, totebags.”

Robson describes millennial unease, the challenges of taking control and letting go, with wit

and compassion. His unconventional household is memorable and he offers perceptive observations on generational difference, navigating London, family ties, friendship, losing

parents and becoming parents.

Originally published by The Observer