'Mr. Mac and Me' by Esther Freud

     This is an absorbing book, set in Walberswick on the Suffolk coast, where the author has a bungalow looking out over the sea. The central character is Thomas Maggs, a young boy with a limp who befriends a stranger and his wife who come to live in the village just before the outbreak of World War One. The stranger is Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the architect who designed the famous Glasgow School of Art, and his wife is the artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. They befriend the boy, Thomas, who has artistic talent, and whose parents own and run the pub, The Blue Anchor. Charles Mackintosh has found it difficult to get commissions for more architectural work, and he and his wife move to the Suffolk coast, spending much of his time painting watercolors of plants and flowers. Insights into his life are provided to Thomas Maggs by his letters, which--in a rather unlikely narrative ploy--are steamed open by Thomas and his sister after Mackintosh has given them to Thomas to post (or mail as one would say in the U.S.)
     Mackintosh and his wife did live on the coast during this period, and--with his constant wandering around with his binoculars--he was suspected of being a German spy. This is a concern of Thomas, and Mackintosh is briefly arrested as a spy.
     The 'point of view' is that of Thomas, his fears and concerns for his mother, his sister, and even for his drunken father, and as the motif of the novel the relationship with Mr. Mac. All of which is set against the way the coastal community is shaped by the World War, a subject the author has clearly researched.
     I was lucky to get the book: it was given to us by a friend whose late husband--an architect--was a devotee of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
     There is a long interview of Esther Freud in the New York Times, to be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/garden/esther-freud-on-mr-mac-and-me-and-the-cottage-that-inspired-it.html