'A Beautifully Crafted Tale' – Summer At Tangents Golf Book Review

Summer At Tangents is a superb comic novel set in the village of Tangents, with its poorly attended church and struggling golf club. The diocese is now threatening to close the church. The vicar’s friend, Willoughby Cornwallis, a crafty golf club committeeman, acts to save the church in ways which also benefit the golf club and his friends, but which also involve conning almost everyone along the way. What unfolds is a beautifully crafted tale involving many laugh-out loud moments.

One of the subplots involves the vicar’s attempts to win a club trophy, despite, in the words of his friend, having “all the composure on the green of a man being tasered whilst disco dancing during an earthquake.”

But then Willoughby is equally unimpressed by the play of his own regular partner who gets into a bunker...

“Spent a fair chunk of the afternoon – well I think he would like us to believe he was trying to chip out, but it was suggested he was trying to tunnel to Australia. Opinion was sharply divided on the matter.”
“The bunker on the 8th?”
“It’s the one with lots of confused kangaroos and wallabies falling out of it upside down”.

But how much golf has Willoughby actually been playing? The Secretary wants him to play in enough competitions to be eligible to be re-elected to the competitions committee to avoid an even less suitable member being elected in his stead. But Willoughby claims to the Secretary that: 

“Matron has put me off games at present because of my ankle.”
“How long have you had your ankle?”
“All my life. I left mother well provided for. She was good to me.”
“I mean how long have you had this injury to your ankle?”

Roderick Easdale is a well-established golf journalist who contributes regularly to Golf Monthly and his understanding of the world of golf clubs and their members shines through in this affectionate yet sharp depiction of a dysfunctional golf club.

The novel salutes the role clubs can play in the life of their local community and in bringing people together who otherwise would never meet. In a moving final chapter, a member is mourning a good friend: “If you add up the hours I have spent with him – I have just been having a wee stab at it – I reckon it comes to years. Literally. All of them at the golf club. If it wasn’t for golf, I would never have known him.”

But one of the figures refers to the golf club “in all its glory and idiocy”. That a newcomer is told he cannot park in the lady captain’s parking space, even though the lady captain herself does not drive and so never uses it, will strike a chord with many readers. 

The club steward, who delights in using the club’s arcane rules against the members, is one of many memorable and cleverly drawn characters in this deftly observed novel.

Summer at Tangents is available from all good bookshops and bookseller websites, such as Amazon. Paperback RRP: £8.99; e-book RRP: £3.99