Anthony Daly

If you are lucky enough to have grown up in a peaceful country, with good parents and prospects, you might find it hard to imagine what it would be like to be desperate, socially stuck and living in a place of abuse or conflict. These young people can end up vulnerable and on our streets, often with no one and nothing to turn to. It is these people who provide voices in this fantastic account of London’s underground prostitution scene in the 1970s, stories we can’t help but be moved by.
Anthony Daly, 20, left the difficult political situation in Ireland to go to work at Foyles Book Shop in London, 1975. He has no support network in the immediate area yet has pressing needs for money, food and someone to offer some kindness. This he thinks he receives when he is found in Playland amusement arcade trying to make his last pennies into something bigger, when a man offers to take him to a pub for some food, where he is introduced to two older, distinguished men. By the morning he is drugged and homosexually raped multiple times, threatened, but paid a substantial amount of money. While still working for Foyles, he becomes forced into becoming a male prostitute, or rent, subjected to the most horrendous of acts without consent and through fear of violence until he managed to escape. He thought that nothing could be worse than living through the troubles, but he was wrong.
This book has also been published in 2018 as Playland, it’s had a good make over and seems a bit more relevant and current since there have been a lot of stories about the establishment and abuse of power in the media in Britain and elsewhere in recent times.
The book is gripping and very informative, you get a full sense of the situation from beginning to end, including updates as to what happened to the main characters in the following years. This is an important book for everyone because most of us, luckily, don’t know these horrors, but they exist in all societies to some extent and these people deserve a voice and to heal through understanding. Obviously if you have personal experience of any of these issues, it is worth approaching this book with care and someone around who you can talk freely to if anything crops up that causes you strong emotion. The account isn’t overly graphic but it does contain enough description for caution to be taken. Daly writes with a consistent narrative voice and is really good at helping you understand how he became trapped into his abuse and found it so difficult to walk away. Another bonus of this book is the description of the places and politics of the time, which I found really fair and informative. Overall I found the content of the book upsetting in places, but couldn’t put this account down and wouldn’t go back and not read it for anything.… (meer)