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london books : reviews Books set in London reviewed by Londoners. London Born by Sidney Day Read it on the tube rating: 8/10 read it on the Northern line; Day travelled through the exact-same tunnels, while the world above was so utterly alien. The fascinating memoir London Born is the work of 93-year old Sidney Day, as dictated to his granddaughter – he himself never learned to read or write. Day tells of his days as a chancer and petty criminal in the north London of his childhood and young adulthood. It almost beggars belief that the city he describes – where men bet on their pet birds in pubs, ponies and carts fill the streets, bread and dripping is a standard dinner and you know what people do by the hats they wear – is the same city that we live in, and within living memory. To my mind, this book is most directly comparable with works like Cider With Rosie and Larkrise to Candleford, with their tales of growing up in rural poverty in much the same period. Of course, for every parallel, such as the way children were left to roam freely all day, there are just as many differences, owing to the urban setting. The distinct identity of the Londoner comes across very strongly, helped by the language employed. Helen Day has put her grandfather’s idiom straight into the text, which is peppered with “cor blimey”s and “clip round the ear ‘ole”s. I found the section on the Second World War to be particularly refreshing. The war Day tells of is not the mythologised Blitz spirit but one much closer to what my gran (bombed out of the Old Kent Road) describes. Instead people try to subvert the system, get out of dangerous duties and generally look after number one. All in all, this is an absorbing read that should make you look afresh at the city around you. KS Incendiary by Chris Cleave Read it on the tube rating: 6/10 a readable style and some interesting ideas, but ultimately flawed. Following 9/11 and the Madrid bombings, Chris Cleave had the idea of writing about an imaginary Islamic terrorist attack on London – a mass suicide bombing at Arsenal’s new Ashburton Grove stadium leaves over 1,000 dead. Unfortunately for him, the novel came out the week of the 7 July bombings, which pretty much scuppered its chances. The novel takes the form of letters written by a bereaved woman to Osama bin Laden, telling of the attacks themselves, the effects on the country and her own efforts to get to the bottom of the events. There are many notes which ring true – Elton John’s England’s heart is bleeding being lodged permanently at number one being just one example. To my mind, however, Cleave brings in so many strands, coincidences and irrelevant characters – class warfare emerges as a major theme – that the story just becomes implausible. I think that loss and the political response to the atrocity are big enough issues to merit a book to themselves. While of course the 7 July attacks were, thankfully, on a far smaller scale, the benefit of hindsight also undermines much of Cleave’s story. It actually has the effect of making the Blair government’s response look very measured – Muslims have not been sacked en masse, curfews have not been imposed and barrage balloons do not fill our skies. The real London comes off pretty well by comparison with this dystopian vision. KS Crash by JG Ballard Read it on the tube rating: 4/10 with such perverse erotic passages, neighbours' wandering eyes might meet with a surprise The M25 has never seemed so exciting. Ballard (author of Cocaine Nights and Empire of the Sun) writes London's highways and ring roads into a nightmarish fantasy of sexual deviancy, paranoia, lurid advertisements and sinister technologies. Quickly gaining an underground cult status following its publication in 1973 and rocketing into the realm of mass readership after Kronenburg's interpretation, Crash is as bizarre and disturbing now as it was over thirty years ago. London provides the backdrop to the hyper-real, technological world of Vaughan and Catherine; a world all the more unsettling for its familiarity. Vaughan 'meets whores in all-night cafes and supermarkets of London Airport' and dangerously cruises 'the Northbound motorway from Ashford'. This is London alright but Ballard's description of it is cold and peripheral. Characters are obsessed only with the orbitals and flyovers of the city not the nitty gritty of metropolitan living. This is not a book for the squeamish. Romance is dead
in this novel. Ballard's novel is a raw and direct account of sexual deviancy. It rates highly on the shockometer. However, beneath the sex and catastrophes lies a social commentary, a political message or question even. Crash asks us to examine more closely the modern world, to look past the glossy ads, the dreams of class, money and desire foisted upon us by capitalism. The car and collision emerge as metaphors for modernity. Readers who see past the pornography, will get the most out of this book. Nosy tube passengers, on the other hand, might get more than they bargained for! PL White City Blue by Tim Lott Read it on the tube rating: 7/10 a breezy but insightful read White City Blue deals with male friendships and relationships in the modern world. It tells the story of Frankie Blue, known as Frank the Fib, a 30-year old estate agent who has always regarded his mates as the most important thing in his life. Over the course of the book, all his easy assumptions are thrown into question, and we are made to wonder how well we ever really know, understand or even like our friends. While the author’s style is light and undemanding on the reader, the fact that he has so much to say about the way we live, and what we prioritise, raises White City Blue above most of the “lad lit” genre. And for all you West Londoners out there, the book is jam-packed with local colour. Lott is clearly on intimate terms with the pubs, streets, parks and character of Shepherd’s Bush and beyond. KS The Line of beauty by Alan Hollinghurst Read it on the tube rating: 9/10 as long as you don’t get embarrassed by the sex scenes. OK, so it’s not exactly cutting-edge or underground to recommend last year’s Booker winner, but The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst is itself a work of beauty, and one that portrays a London that will be alien to many londonlostandfound readers. It spans the period between Thatcher’s overwhelming election victories of 1982 and 1987, when 'The Lady', who overshadows the entire novel and even makes a cameo appearance, was at the height of her powers. It is told through the eyes of Nick Guest, a bright young Oxford graduate who finds himself in the cocooned world of leafy Holland Park, populated by Tory MPs, aristocrats and leaders of industry. Guest is a rather ambiguous character, fascinated and delighted by the circles he finds himself in but not a social climber nor motivated by money or power. Instead, his real passion is for beauty, which becomes something of a quest for him. Guest is also a homosexual and while Hollinghurst is very keen not to be pigeonholed as a gay writer, there is certainly a fair amount of gay sex, relationships, identity and issues. As the decade progresses and the mood of the book becomes darker, the spectre of AIDS also comes to the fore. Of course, Hollinghurst has a very valid argument that his work is no more gay literature than much of the literary canon investigating relationships between men and women is heterosexual literature. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that did not tell the whole story. This is a book, in the main, about being gay, rather than about someone who happens to be gay. What really makes the novel for me is Hollinghurst’s ear for language. He has a poet’s sensitivity for sound and detail, as in this description of a summer’s night: “In summer, when windows everywhere were open, night seemed made of sound as much as shadow, the whisper of the leaves, the unsleeping traffic rumble, far-off car horns and squeals of brakes; voices, faint shouts, a waveband twiddle of unconnected music”. All in all, I found this to be an absorbing book which did what good literature should and immersed me in an unfamiliar world. KS Enduring Love by Ian McEwan Read on the tube rating: 8 /10 a far better bet than the recent film adaptation. There’s something inherently cinematic about the opening pages of Ian McEwan’s tale of obsession and paranoia. That infamous scene with the hot air balloon was always very visual and Roger Michell’s recent film version, adapted by the playwright Joe Penhall did not disappoint in that respect. As Joe, Daniel Craig turned in a performance of necessary intensity (though Rhys Ifans never quite shook off the image of him standing on a Notting Hill doorstep in his pants). Where the film fell apart was where it deviated from its source material, substituting sub Fatal Attraction clichés for the novel’s mainly cerebral narrative. The opening chapter takes place not in London but in the Oxfordshire countryside where Joe, an academic, is on the verge of proposing to his artist girlfriend Claire. A sudden freak accident interrupts their idyllic picnic, the unfortunate consequences of which haunt all who were involved. Amongst the witnesses was Jed, an odd young man who believes their shared experience has created some sort of bond between Joe and himself, a belief that quickly develops into obsession. The novel paints a believable picture of North London intelligentsia as Joe and Claire find their cosy Maida Vale existence increasingly disrupted. In the film, Jed is a stock weirdo who lives in anonymous predictable squalor but McEwan’s Jed is a more complex creation, independently wealthy, living an isolated existence in a dingy Hampstead mansion. Crucially though, the reason the film fails where the novel succeeds is down to the way McEwan builds up the tension, planting the very real possibility that much of what is happening is a result of Joe’s paranoia, that it is all in his head. It’s an ambiguity the film lacks and is weaker as result. NT Small Island by Andrea Levy Read on the tube rating: 9/10 a vivid, intelligent novel, impeccably researched and immensely readable. Part of an increasingly rich seam of writing about the immigrant experience of Londoners, Andrea Levy’s Small Island is an ambitious, intelligent novel and a far more satisfying read than the over-hyped likes of White Teeth; Levy’s fourth novel was the winner of the 2004 Orange Prize and deservedly so. Set in a city still recuperating from the onslaught of the Second World War, the novel is a compelling tale of cultural relations and unfulfilled expectations. With her husband still overseas, Queenie Bligh rents out the rooms in her Earls Court house to Jamaican lodgers despite the disapproval of her neighbours. Among them are Gilbert Jones, a former RAF officer now working for the postal service, and his naïve wife Hortense, a proud, young teacher, still fresh off the boat. Throughout the novel Levy switches frequently between Queenie’s voice and those of Gilbert and Hortense, and eventually also with that of Bernard, Queenie’s absent husband. Gilbert initially appears to be a well-meaning but incompetent man, a figure of fun, but through flashbacks Levy gradually reveals his warm, compassionate nature, his tender friendship with Queenie, and the everyday indignities he has to endure courtesy of his English neighbours and co-workers. And, though unbearably haughty to begin with, it is hard not to feel for Hortense as her cherished image of the ‘Mother Country’ crumbles as the result of a series of disappointments and humiliations. Even Bernard, a cold and stand-offish character, has had to grapple with much hardship in his life and is dealing with it in the best way he can. This is a novel packed with wonderful moments and memorable images; it is also incredibly well researched, though it never feels burdened by this fact, instead Levy successfully blends the familiar with the startling: she contrasts the petty, sniping intolerance of the British with the overt hatred of the American GIs, she describes the aftermath of an air raid with an eye for absurd but brutal details. Though some of her plot twists are a little too neat, she makes vivid a specific slice of history rarely touched upon in literature. NT Hard Work by Polly Toynbee Read it on the tube rating: 8/10 Guardian journalist and resident of leafy Clapham Polly Toynbee was challenged to work at and live on the minimum wage for Lent. In the book Hard Graft she writes about her experiences, describing a very different London to the one many readers of this site will know. Toynbee moved out of her comfortable home and into a grotty flat on the nearby Clapham Park Estate, the largest and allegedly the worst in Lambeth. As a resident of Clapham Park myself, I do not wholly recognise the picture that she paints; although she is at pains to explain that the flat was awaiting renovation, that a major regeneration process was already underway and that problems are highly localised. She describes her initial encounters with the authorities in trying to furnish the flat and claim benefits, as well as those with the loan sharks and companies that prey on the vulnerable. She then took up a range of menial jobs of the kind that keep the cogs of our society working – care assistant, school dinner lady, hospital porter and cleaner, nursery worker, call centre drone, factory worker, etc. Especially striking is her discovery that she actually earns far less in real terms than she did in similar jobs as a student in the early 1970s. The overall impression is that the needs of a huge swathe of London’s (and the country’s) population are simply not given any consideration. This runs from delays in benefit and salary payments, bureaucracy and the cost and time involved in crossing London by bus for interviews that never happen to the complete absence of joined-up thinking and loss of rights that has resulted from the outsourcing of most low-paid public sector work. Toynbee is very conscious about not coming across as patronising, and very keen to redress the balance of media reportage on Britain’s poor – the overwhelming majority of those she describes work (often literally) night and day to support families on what most of us would regard as an utter pittance. I thoroughly recommend this reality check as a thought-provoking reminder of what hard work really means for large numbers of London’s inhabitants. KS Clear by Nicola Barker Read on the tube rating: 6 /10 a smart but slight read. One of the Granta Best of British pack, Nicola Barker is an unavoidably talented writer with a sharp ear for dialogue and well developed sense of the absurd. She’s brilliant at capturing that intellectually competitive student way of speaking. But in choosing to base her new novel around last year’s David Blaine starvation stunt she undermines her own abilities. Whatever you felt about Blaine’s 44 day stint hovering over the Thames in a Perspex box, tasteless publicity scam or admirable feat of will, there was no avoiding the blanket press coverage at the time; it’s really far too soon for Barker to say anything new about such a recent event. Adair MacKenny is a smart-mouthed civil servant who’s been doing nicely seducing the occasional Blaine watcher until he meets the enigmatic Aphra, a rather bizarre woman with a fondness for Tupperware and antique shoes. Adair and Aphra embark on a frustrating on-off flirtation (involving a session of energetic sex on the HMS Belfast) but while Adair’s voice is richly developed, Aphra fails to take shape as a character. There’s some cracking stuff in here, Adair’s Ghanaian house mate Solomon is an unapologetically cool creation, but you’re two-thirds of the way through before anything resembling a plot kicks in. Yes, Clear is smart and funny and sharply written, and it probably seemed like an excellent, culturally relevant idea at the time. But one year on, with hindsight, the whole Blaine spectacle seems both too recent and, at the same time, too distant for the novel to leave any lasting impression. NT Cherry by Matt Thorne Read it on the tube rating: 6/10 compelling enough to make you miss your stop. The sixth novel from New Puritan Matt Thorne is a page-turning urban adventure with a strong cinematic feel. The film it owes its biggest debt to is undoubtedly David Fincher’s 1997 follow-up to the dark, rain-swept Seven. In The Game uptight, wealthy Michael Douglas was involved in an elaborate hoax that took over his life. No aspect of his existence was above infiltration by the dubious corporation his brother employed to inject a little excitement into his life. His sense of what was real and what was part of the game quickly began to crumble. In Thorne’s novel, teacher Steve Ellis lives in a grubby, unnamed London borough and hasn’t been involved in a relationship for over twelve years. A chance encounter with a man in a bar leads to him being set up with his perfect woman. Cherry is everything he desires, she meets his every specification of the ideal partner and he falls immediately, completely in love. Is she an actress? A prostitute? A creation of his increasingly paranoid mind? After a period of sex-filled bliss Cherry starts to become ill, dangerously unwell, and faced with the prospect of losing her for good, Ellis must decide how far he will go to keep her. Ellis is a hard man to get a handle on; he’s selfish, lazy and has an unnerving capacity for violence. But for Thorne’s conceit to truly work he would need to be an even more intense and insular character; as it is there are too many interludes that detract from the novel’s dark premise. It’s a compelling tale but Thorne is playing as many games as anyone in the novel, he throws in so many red herrings and wrong turns that when you look back nothing really adds up. Cherry is simply, slickly written and the narrative has a real momentum but it’s an ultimately unsatisfying tale. NT Going East by Matthew d’Ancona Read it on the tube rating 3/10: just about bearable for that long trip to Cockfosters, maybe. The paperback cover of Matthew d’Ancona’s East London odyssey depicts a pretty young woman, hunched on a dirty curb, starring down at her shoes - a fitting image for this tale of loss and urban isolation - and a world away from the bright colours, bold lettering and backdrop of sketchy city tower blocks that packaged its hardback release. This somewhat heavy handed attempt to hop on the Brick Lane bandwagon misfired completely, only serving to underline the fact that Going East isn’t in the same league as Monica Ali’s carefully crafted narrative. After a devastating personal tragedy, Mia Taylor, an Oxford-educated, affluent political aide abandons her moneyed West London life and relocates to the East End. What follows is neither satire nor social commentary, but a predictable, poorly developed and often bizarre almost-thriller with an implausible, unnecessary gang land finale. D’Ancona was deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph and his debut novel raises some interesting questions about identity and about the possibility of recovering after losing everything, but he fails to provide satisfying or convincing answers, instead concentrating on the violent reprisals and inevitable revelations that surface as Mia begins to question the life she thought she had. The characters in Mia’s adopted world fail to take shape as they should and though he displays a genuine affection for East London as it is today, with its bagel shops and New Age health centres, the writing only really takes off when d’Ancona is describing the society balls and champagne picnics Mia has left behind. NT Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Read it on the tube rating: 9/10 You might not want to put it down on reaching your stop. Sarah Walters is probably best known for Tipping the Velvet, the TV adaptation which raised the temperatures (and hackles) of some tabloid pundits with its depiction of Victorian girl-on-girl action. But it would be a big mistake to view Walters' works as a smut-fest. As her Booker and Orange prize nominations bear out, she is in fact a talented writer with a great deal of subtlety. Fingersmith is a fantastic slice of atmospheric Gothic melodrama, somewhere between a tribute to and pastiche of the genre. It tells the story of Sue Trinder, an orphan brought up among a motley collection of baby farmers, thieves and fences in the slums of Borough (a far cry from today's market, where I overheard "He said he'd meet us by the scallops" and "That's very Hieronymus Bosch" the other week). She becomes embroiled in a scheme to unburden an heiress of her fortune, and there follows a skillfully handled tale of plot and counter-plot, false identity, asylums and other leitmotifs of Victorian fiction. All in all, it's a fun, fast-paced and gripping read. KS A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess Read it on the tube rating: 8/10 The recreated period English does require concentration. A Dead Man in Deptford is a fictionalised account of the life of Christopher Marlowe, the playwright best known as a contemporary of Shakespeare's and author of Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine. It is told through the eyes of an unnamed actor, friend and gay lover of Marlowe. Whilst studying at Cambridge, the social-climbing poet becomes caught up in spying for the state on Catholic conspirators, and we follow his dual careers as writer and reluctant mole to his violent death at an inn in Deptford. The book brilliantly captures the feel of an era in flux and the modern world taking shape. Surnames are just becoming fixed Christopher (or Kit) Marlowe is also variously known as Marley, Morley, Marlin and Merlin, and his Warwickshire rival by such wild variants as Shagspaw, Shogspere, Choxper and Jacquespere. Scotland is still a foreign country. The new Protestant orthodoxy has taken hold, and old ideas have been discarded but not forgotten. We get a real flavour of the brutality and casual violence of the day, with a visceral description of Catholic plotters being hung drawn and quartered, and brawls and sword fights aplenty. Marlowe is presented warts and all - with sympathy but without glamorisation. He is something of a minor player in the great events of the day: Sir Walter Raleigh introduces him to the newly discovered delights of tobacco, and he becomes a very small cog in the machinations to get rid of Mary Queen of Scots. This outsider's view of events can often be very revealing, and of course the narrator of the story is a smaller fish yet. What really makes this book work is the rich language of Burgess, who has replicated Elizabethan language thoroughly convincingly. KS The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd Read it on the tube rating: 6/10 You might look a little pretentious but there are a lot of characters to keep track of. Peter Ackroyd is perhaps best known for his exhaustive (and exhausting) London, the Biography, but he has also authored a number of novels drawing on his incredible knowledge of the city's history. The Clerkenwell Tales is the most recent of these and mines the past of a turbulent area, with which he is fascinated - Ackroyd devotes an entire chapter of the Biography to this district. As the name suggests, this book bears homage to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (it came out last autumn, around the same time as the BBC's reworking of the same stories). Set in the fourteenth century, at a time when Clerkenwell was a thriving commercial and residential area and hotbed of dissension, it tells a story of political and religious intrigue and a plot to oust Richard II and replace him with Henry Bolingbroke. It also serves as a reminder of the power the church once exerted in this country, with the boundary between religion and politics blurred or nonexistent. Ackroyd follows Chaucer's model, with around 20 short tales from the different perspectives of integral or peripheral players in the story. The same names crop up - the Wife of Bath, Pardoner, Nun's Priest, Reeve and so on. There is no need to be a Chaucerian scholar to follow the story, but those who do know the work will probably appreciate many of the parallels and allusions. I found that the narrative structure was (inevitably?) disjointed, making it hard sometimes to work out exactly where characters fitted in. Perhaps it would have benefited from being read at a single session. Ackroyd's Clerkenwell is undoubtedly the star of the book - the tastes, smells and feel of the place are conveyed vividly. The jarring note for me came when, immersed in the fourteenth century, the authorial voice from the present came through. I wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. It is meticulously researched and cleverly interwoven, but for me there was something lacking. I suspect that may be because the absence of a central character, sympathetic or otherwise, made it hard for me to feel for anyone much. You might find some of Ackroyd's other London novels, such as The Great Fire of London or Hawksmoor more accessible. KS London Irish by Zane Radcliffe Read it on the tube rating: 6/10 Whiles away the District line quite merrily. London Irish by Zane Radcliffe has no pretensions at great art. Instead it's a caper involving a happy-go-lucky Northern Irish (Protestant) chancer, an enigmatic Northern Irish (Catholic) beauty and her terrorist brothers. It yomps along at a good pace and is good on the feel of London, mainly Greenwich, where Bic, the hero, runs a pancake stall. It's a light read (very much so for a book where a man is framed for 14 murders) with humour that can be slick but at other times seems a little routine. The plot twists are implausible, but if you switch off your critical faculties for a few hours then there is much to enjoy in this ultimately flawed comic thriller. Oh, and it has a picture of a pint of Guinness on the front. KS London Orbital by Iain Sinclair Read it on the tube rating: 2/10 Marks for perseverance, maybe. Here comes the first drubbing in this section. I was very much looking forward to reading Iain Sinclair's London Orbital. Having read rave reviews when this tale of Sinclair's walk around the M25 first came out, I was expecting to be entertained by a quirky, informative tale. Instead I was bludgeoned with an unwieldy, tedious piece of self-important guff. Sinclair clearly knows and loves London. He has also clearly researched this work in immense detail. For me this was a large part of the problem; there was simply too much, often of seemingly little relevance, crammed into the book. The pages devoted to a discussion of Philippa Gregory's Earthly Joys, set in Waltham Abbey, were a case in point, and my heart sank on reading the announcement that the "walk proper" was beginning - by this stage I had already waded all the way through to page 124. To be fair, the book is not without its merits. I certainly found that it evoked the feel of the period around the new millennium, from the petrol crisis and flooding to the Dome fiasco and on to the burning pyres of foot and mouth. There are also interesting snippets of information tucked away. At the end of the day, however, what it really needed was an editor unafraid to cut 300 pages out and have prevented the book, based on what is a very interesting premise, from becoming such a chore. KS Brick Lane by Monica Ali Read it on the tube rating: 9/10 Plenty of credibility, quick and undemanding to read, some short, self-contained sections allow you to break off when you reach your stop. Brick Lane is the first novel from much-trumpeted author Monica Ali. The PR mill was up and running even in advance of the book's publication, leading to Ali's inclusion in the prestigious Granta list for 2003 on the strength of her drafts alone. Ali has been widely hyped as "the new Zadie Smith", and it's easy to see why this tag has stuck. Both are young, photogenic women writing absorbing novels about London's ethic minority experience. There are also close parallels between Alsana Begum in White Teeth and Brick Lane's central character, Nazneen, both unworldly girls brought to London to marry older men, who take in piecework, etc. But such comparisons are of course sloppy. Brick Lane barely leaves Tower Hamlets and concentrates on the area's Bangladeshi population from the eighties onwards, while White Teeth aims for a broader sweep of cultures (black, white and Asian) and history. Ali's work should not be looked at in the light of anyone else's, but read and appreciated on its own merits. Brick Lane tells the story of Nazneen, "an unspoilt girl from the village" sent to London to marry the rather absurd Chanu - a middle-aged, overweight pseudo-intellectual who frames every certificate he acquires and waits constantly for the promotion that will never come. Ali is not afraid to highlight social problems facing the community - Nazneen witnesses drugs, unhappy marriages and the rise of organised racism and militant Islam. Neither does she shrink from unanswerable questions. Like many novels dealing with the second-generation experience, there are perpetual struggles between the two sets of cultures and attitudes. While Chanu longs to return home, his children have no desire to move to an alien country. Letters from Nazneen's easily led sister show that life is every bit as hard back in Bangladesh. Others in the Tower Hamlets community seek answers in the Bengal Tigers, a politicised and fairly fundamentalist form of Islam, and while they achieve some good (bringing people together, organising mela celebrations) there is an air of ridiculousness about their efforts. Early on, Chanu looks like the villain of the piece, isolating his wife by discouraging her from learning English or even leaving the flat to shop, but he mellows as the story progresses, until Nazneen ends up taking the decisions about their future and the reader's sympathies shift too. This is a book written with a light touch and gentle humour, even though much of the subject matter is deadly serious. It treats the reader like a grown-up and does not patronise with pat solutions. And, much as I hate to say it, if you liked White Teeth you'll probably enjoy this too. KS
London Fields by Martin Amis Read it on the tube rating: 9/10 With its build-up to the day of the murder, this book's structure makes it easy to pick up the thread. And you'll manage the balancing act of looking intelligent but not pretentiousness. For me, London Fields is a definitive London novel. Written in 1992 and set in the run-up to the new millennium, there is a bleak, pre-apocalyptic feel about the world it creates, in which the characters go about their squalid but ultimately small business. Told though the eyes of Samson Young, the American who is at once omniscient narrator and occasional protagonist, it tells the story of Nicola Six, a glamorous murder victim. She has always known what her future holds, and there is an air of inevitability as she meets, manipulates and joins forces with the man she believes will kill her. This is Keith Talent, a small-time crook dreaming of darts glory - a sparkling literary creation. There is a strong sense of place, in seedy (and plush, but Amis does seedy better) corners of west London. But what makes this book truly great is the feel of brooding menace the author creates and the sheer relish with which he writes, plus some fantastic names (Amis out-Dickens Dickens here) - Chick Purchase, Hope Clinch, Annaliese Furnish and Trish Shirt to name but a few. Some people find Amis a bit much, but if you like a book you can get your teeth into then try taking a bite out of this. KS Do Not Pass Go by Tim Moore Read it on the tube rating: 9/10 Remind yourself quite how varied this city is and just why it is that you live here. You might find yourself wanting to get off to look anew at things you pass by unnoticed every day. In this breezy read, Monopoly-buff Moore travels around London, from the highs of dining at the Ritz (Piccadilly) to the lows of a sewage plant (waterworks). This book is informative about both the game of Monopoly and the city of London. It explains the somewhat erratic way in which the locations were chosen (does anyone actually know - without consulting an A to Z - where Vine Street can be found? I thought not) by the American couple converting the game from its Atlantic City origins. Peppered with useful facts to file away (I was intrigued to learn that Pocahontas was the first American to visit London), this book is Bryson-esque in the balance it achieves between entertainment and erudition, even if it does not go all-out for belly laughs in quite the same way. A great Christmas present for any lover of London, or of Monopoly. KS Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith Read it on the tube rating: 6/10 Nice short chunks, but avoid if you're prone to sniggering out loud. Diary of a Nobody was written in installments for Private Eye over a hundred years ago, but retains its freshness today. Brothers George and Weedon Grossmith describe the life of middle-class, suburban clerk Charles Pooter with a uniquely British brand of affectionate mocking. Yes, Pooter is absurd, self-important, pompous and wrapped up in his banal little life in Holloway, but he is at heart a decent man, portrayed here with gentle humour. The story features a supporting cast that includes Pooter's cad-about-town son Lupin, friends Gowing and Cumming ("Gowing's always coming and Cumming's always going"), Mrs James of Sutton (a rather "fast" influence on his wife Carrie), plus endless trouble with freeloaders, door scrapers, tradesmen and fashion. Pooter is an archetypal Englishman and Victorian, but at the same time there is an immensely timeless quality about him. This gem could so easily be cruel, but avoids that fate because its wit never forgets to be sensitive. KS |
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Dead Man in Deptford / Anthony Burgess
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