Norman Collins - London Belongs to Me

Author: Norman Collins

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics

First published:1945

Setting: London, UK
Read in March 2014

My Rating ★★★★  4.2

My Waterstones Review

In the microcosm of No. 10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, Norman Collins documents with dead-pan humour the lives of the tenants of a boarding house in the two year period from Christmas 1938. London Belongs to Me is loosely split into seven books of unequal length. 

The first book opens with the retirement of Mr Josser as an account's clerk from Battlebury's and his coming to terms with life at home under the feet of Mrs Josser, the matriarch. Doris Josser has started at work and unlike her sibling, Ted, is still living at home. Ted has a good job and is married to Cynthia, an ex-usherette whose life is occupied by Baby. Moving upstairs we have Mrs Boon and her mechanic son Percy, he plays life on the edge. In the attic rooms are Connie Clark, a colourful cloakroom attendant and Mr Puddy, a portly and stammering night watchman. The boarding house is owned by spinster Mrs Vizzard who shares the basement with the pyschic Mr Squales. These are unglamorous lives but observed through our microscope they are certainly interesting lives. The book is punctuated with some wonderful secondary characters including Bill, Mrs Jan Byl, Mr Barks and the eccentric Uncle Henry.

This novel is over 700 pages, it never drifts and it is never dull; it was a delight to read. The focus of attention changes between each book but we never lose touch with any of the principal characters. Living in a closed community their lives must interact with each other, but it is subtle, privacy is maintained between each household. This is an interesting phase in London's history, war seems inevitable but it does not dominate life, it begins to take effect with the evacuation of Dunkirk (27 May - 4 Jun 1940) and the start of The Blitz on 7 September 1940. Every reader will have a favourite character, by a short nose mine was Uncle Henry.

The Man Who Fell to Earth - Walter Tevis

Author: Walter Tevis

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics

First published:1963

Setting: USA
Read in March 2014

My Rating ★★★★  3.9

My Waterstones Review

Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien from planet Anthea who has landed in an isolated part of Kentucky. He is tall at six and a half feet with white hair, peculiar looking but not out of place; out of disguise he would have no fingernails and only slits for his eyes, he was human; but not, properly, a man. He is highly intelligent and uses his knowledge from Anthea to patent inventions that creates immense wealth. His mission is to construct a space ship to ferry the few remaining Antheans to Earth to stop it from destroying itself with Nuclear bombs. 

Nathan Bryce is a Professor at an Iowa University who is struck by the definition of the film he was watching at the cinema. At an all night drugstore he sees some 35mm camera film with the same brand name Worldcolour from World Enterprises Corporation. Intrigued by the claim to be self-developing he sets about analysing the chemical properties only to discover the process did not use conventional chemicals. His suspicions will lead him to applying for a position with W.E.Corp.

Set in the future in 1985 this science fiction book never strays too far from reality. In Kentucky Thomas finds that he tires easily under the 90 degree heat being physically unable to perspire and in a hotel elevator his body cripples with the multiplication effect of gravity. Here he meets a chubby, pretty woman, Betty Jo, who looks after him when he passes out. Betty Jo is a Gin alcoholic. Betty Jo and Nathan will become friends of Thomas but the inventions and gathering of scientists around his project will not go unnoticed by the American authorities.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a short book of less than 200 pages, it is beautifully written. In 1976 it was made into a film starring David Bowie and it reached cult status.

A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

Author: Evelyn Waugh

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics

First published:1934

Setting: Warwickshire and London, UK and Boa Vista, Brazil
Read in March 2014

My Rating ★★★★  4.0

My Waterstones Review

In January 2010 Time Magazine published a list of the top 100 books written in English since 1923 and amongst many modern day classics you will find A Handful of Dust. Similarly it made the top 100 best novels of the 20th century in the Modern Library list coming in at number 34.

Written on the theme of the betrayed romantic A Handful of Dust starts with an introduction of the insignificant and shallow John Beaver who at Brat's club had managed to wangle a weekend invite to Lord and Lady Last's Gothic mansion Hetton Abbey. Taken by surprise, Tony makes himself scarce with duties around his beloved estate leaving Lady Brenda to entertain John Beaver. Lady Brenda considers John rather pathetic but nonetheless he has taken her fancy. In one of Lady Brenda's weekday trips to London there is a chance lunchtime meeting with John's mother who is selling some small flats in Belgravia. We soon find that Lady Brenda has invited John Beaver to Lady Polly Cockpurse's party and the start of the affair is set. Speculation amongst Society is rife and is confirmed when Lady Brenda lets a flat and starts an Economics course in order to remain in London for longer periods.

The origins of a A Handful of Dust unusually starts with the ending. In December 1923 Evelyn Waugh embarked on a 3 month trip to British Guiana in S.America and this resulted in the short story 'The Man Who Liked Dickens' which was published in America. A Handful of Dust followed with a serialized version published in an American Magazine and called 'A Flat in London', this had a much closer affinity with the earlier chapters but which required the alternative ending due to the earlier publishing of 'The Man Who Liked Dickens'. The novel version of A Handful of Dust has a disconcerting shift from England to S.America to bind in the short story in the chapter called Du Côté de Chez Todd.  

In A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh gives a satirical dig at the landed gentry, the decay of English society, the disintegration of social and moral standards and the resulting set of shallow values. This is both a tragedy and a comedy with the unlikely hero of an English society bore.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - Mohsin Hamid

Author: Mohsin Hamid

Publisher: Penguin Books

First published:2013

Setting: Asia
Read in March 2014

My Rating ★★     2.4

My Waterstones Review

My expectations were high having loved Mohsin's previous book The Reluctant Fundamentalist, ultimately it was like falling off a cliff, it didn't take long to get to the end and the view got progressively worse as I realised it was never going to improve. In a literary sense it made me feel somewhat inadequate, the publishers had provided forty endorsements from a series of papers and magazines, and Philip Pulman thought it 'Intriguing, compelling and moving. A marvellous book'. What did I miss!

It opens by explaining that this is a self-help book, it isn't. Its chapter titles suggest an order for a would-be entrepreneur; Move to the city, Get an education, Don't fall in love....Have an exit strategy, these are used as a framework for the life story of an Asian who starts life as a country boy in a single mud-walled room. It feels more like a love story, boy meets girl, will they get together?

Each chapter starts with a page or so reminding us that we are back in self-help mode, before returning to the storyline. We are traveling through life at breakneck speed, it feels like we are continually jumping in time and lacks a degree of continuity. This is a short book, a page turner for all the wrong reasons, 12 chapters, 228 pages with 4 pages of white space between each chapter and an unusual line spacing that only manages 24-25 lines per page, this should by rights be filling only half the space in my library.

Written in the second person narrative some of the sentences were unnecessarily difficult to read, this was normally at the beginning of each chapter so much so that I began to dread the end of each chapter and these came round often enough. This was a great pity, as the second person narrative was one of the reasons why I liked The Reluctant Fundamentalist, it was refreshingly different. Ultimately, this book had very little depth, bordering on the boring, and annoying, but I really must have missed something, didn't I?

Agent Zigzag - Ben Macintyre

Author: Ben Macintyre

Publisher: Bloomsbury

First published: 2007

Setting: Britain, France, Germany, Norway
Read in August 2013

My Rating ★★★★  4.2

My Waterstones Review

Eddie Chapman was 24 when Ben Macintyre takes up his account of Britain's most improbable double agent of WWII. At 17 Eddie had lasted just 9 months in the army before absconding. When the army finally caught up with him he received 84 days in Aldershot military prison before being dishonorably discharged. After release he returned to Soho and turned to petty crime, prostitution and blackmail picking up lengthening sentences along the way. He then turned his hand to safe-cracking and formed the 'Jelly Gang' so called because of their use of gelignite, they were successful. Fast cars, Saville Row suits and living it up in London followed along with acquaintances made with Noel Coward, Ivor Novello and Marlene Dietrich. In February 1939 the police finally caught up with him in Jersey, but Eddie escaped by jumping through a restaurant window and while on the run was fortunate enough to break into a pavilion before being caught, by breaking a Jersey law he avoided a quick return to Britain.

Eddie received a two year sentence with an extra year added after he briefly escaped from jail. On 30th June 1940 while still serving his three year sentence Jersey was invaded by Germans. In October 1941 he was released from prison but wanting to return to Britain he conjured an ingenious plan, if I bluffed my way into becoming a German spy they would will find a way of getting me home undercover. With a friend, Faramus, they wrote a letter to the German Command offering their services but they heard nothing, until one morning the Gestapo arrested them for sabotage, a new experience for Eddie being arrested for something he had not done. They were transferred to the infamous Fort de Romainville prison in Paris. Meanwhile the letter had reached the German Secret Service and by April 1942 Eddie had been recruited by Dr Stephan Graumann, leaving his friend Faramus behind as hostage for Chapman's good behaviour. Trained in wireless, sabotage, espionage and parachute jumping and with a codename of Fritz it was in December 1942 when Eddie parachuted into Britain.

Bletchley Park had been tracking references to Fritz since February 1942, were aware of the 9500 Francs paid for remodeling Eddie's teeth after a failed parachute jump and knew that Fritz would soon be going on his holiday. Early on 16th December 1942 Eddie landed in a celery field in Cambridgeshire having missed his drop point after being dangled out of an aircraft at high speed.

Ben Macintyre's account is brilliant and is extremely easy to read, a page turner in fact, this is generally not the case for either a historical book or a biography. It reads like a piece of far fetched fiction but every word is true, outstanding for its genre.

Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh

Author: Evelyn Waugh

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics

First published:1928

Setting: Oxford, Wales, London, Hampshire UK
Read in February 2014

My Rating ★★★★  4.4

My Waterstones Review

Paul Pennyfeather is in his third year as an undergraduate at the fictional Scone College, Oxford. One evening he is returning across the quad to his rooms when he is discovered by the Bollinger Club, debagged and consequently sent down for indecent behaviour. Losing his guardians allowance he takes a teaching position in a small inferior public school based in a castle in North Wales. Here he meets a motley crew of teachers, staff and pupils. Dr Fagan the headmaster, his two daughters Flossie and Dingy, their butler and professional conman Mr Soloman Philbrick, and fellow teachers Captain Grimes, ex-public school pupil of Podger's who goes through life from one crises to another being saved from "the soup" by the old-boys network, and wig wearing, pipe smoking, ex-clergyman Mr Prendergast who has developed insuperable Doubts.

Decline and Fall is a rich comedy of carefully selected  narrative and dialogue that is loosely based on Waugh's time at Oxford and as a teacher in Wales. This was his first published novel and he must have had great fun conjuring his characters, including the Countess of Circumference and their son Lord Tangent, and the Honourable Mrs Margot Beste-Chetwynde the attractive and wealthy mother of Peter who engineers Paul to become his private tutor and then to be engaged to his mother. Throughout there is a tongue in cheek poking of fun at the establishment and comparisons can be made to the writings of P.G. Woodhouse. Evelyn Waugh meant this to be a funny book, it is!

City of Women - David Gillham

Author: David Gillham

Publisher: Penguin Books

First published: 2013

Setting: Berlin, Germany
Read in February 2014

My Rating ★★★★  4.1

My Waterstones Review

Early in 1943 the German 6th Army has surrendered in Stalingrad and doubts are beginning to grow on the outcome of the war. Goebbels' propaganda machine calls for 'Total War' and in Berlin Jews are being rounded-up.  Against this backdrop we find Sigrid Schröder, a stenographer, living with her mother in law while her husband, Kasper, is fighting on the Eastern Front. Her life seems tough, living off meager rations that is made into soup, frequent air raids by the Tommies, nights spent in the basement with the other residents of the apartment block and evenings spent in a small flat avoiding her mother in law who despises her for not providing her with a grandchild, her duty as a married woman.

Sigrid often escapes to the cinema and here she meets a man who is to become her lover, Egon, a Jewish lover. Here she also befriends Ericha Kohl who is the young duty-year girl for her neighbour Frau Granzinger and her six children; Mrs Granzinger had been awarded the Mother's Cross. Ericha is being pursued by plain clothes officers of the SiPo (Security Police) and desperately asks Sigrid to help her. This is the first difficult choice that we see Sigrid make, help Ericha or be a good German. Sigrid starts to help Ericha who is working in an undercover network hiding Jews, deserters and others escaping the Nazi regime and in fear of their lives. Against advice Sigrid is drawn to a Jewish mother, Anna Weiss from Vienna, and her two young daughters, she is sure that they are the wife and family of Egon, if she betrays them she could have Egon for herself.

City of Women paints a realistic view of life in Berlin at this time and from this aspect is on a par with the detective novels of Philip Kerr (Bernie Gunther stories). What I found extraordinary about this book is that it is a debut novel written by a man, and convincingly taking a woman's story. It feels that difficult choices are made by ordinary women every day. Who can you trust? There are party members and servants of the Police and Gestapo everywhere, many are willing to become an informant in order to avoid torture and imprisonment, and if someone is breaking the law then recriminations will be felt by family members. For the poor Jew they are just as likely to be denounced by another Jew employed as a Catcher. The theme on who to trust and who can be used drives the book through to its end, it is certainly gripping.