A fascinating book containing some brilliant music that brings back memories of those long lost days.

As a fan of the sixties, music and culture, I thought I would enjoy this book. Sadly I have to conclude it was not for me. Without going in to too much detail, I gave up after a certain point. Sure other people will engage with the author but on the whole the subject and style were not to my taste.

For several reasons, I found it difficult to critique Fell-Holden’s account of his eighteen-year-old self returning from living in London to stay with his mother in a squalid two-roomed flat where he slept on a put-me-up in the kitchen.

Subtitled: A Street Level Memoir of the Year of Love-Ins, 1967, Bill (as he refers to himself throughout) begins his story at the start of an uncommonly warm British summer, in a small-town tourist resort on the Fylde coast of Lancashire, where he takes a seasonal job as a deckchair attendant. He makes friends with a couple of his workmates, and spends his days collecting money from holidaymakers and gazing lecherously at beautiful bodies on the beach. During the balmy evenings he discovers the local nightlife, drinks beer with his companions and, if he is not staying in to ‘watch telly’ with his mum, has intimate encounters with a variety of men.

Contrary to the promotional blurb, this is no hippy-fest - although trippy young people in flowery clothing and beads do make an appearance, and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is mentioned a couple of times. It is, however, a candid depiction of the still furtive male gay scene in the very year that the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised sex between two men over the age of 21 – though Bill never alludes to this momentous development (perhaps because, at the time, he was still legally underage).

From a purely historical perspective, it’s a fascinating social record of low income, unemployed and gay lives in northern England during the 1960s; but as a coherent work of literature, it is, in parts, rather like reading the scribbled notes of an adolescent boy. Large sections of the text appear to be lifted unaltered from the pages of a journal, interspersed with a meandering (sometimes almost unintelligible) commentary, which feels like it has been added at a later date – as if the mature Bill searched for interesting words in a thesaurus to fill out the narrative. This not only creates an uneven reading experience, but gives the impression that Journey Out Returning is a bizarre cross between The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and The Orton Diaries , except it tends to be amusing for all the wrong reasons.

This is sad because when he is not padding his sentences with senseless verbiage, Bill’s writing has moments of real depth and poignancy. He has an uncanny ear for the rhythms and intonations of everyday conversation, and his work is at its best when recording life’s more quotidian details.

I read this memoir from beginning to end, and concluded that if I were Bill’s editor I would go through the text with a big blue pencil before asking him to rewrite. Amidst the waffle is an interesting tale waiting to be told.