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?