Visitors gone - regretfully because they are both dear, old friends - but still, the work involved before, and after, is enormous given our normally sedentary life style. Anyway, we're back to normal now so I can continue to 'Bore for Britian'!
Today I want to urge you all to rush out and beg, borrow or steal any books written by John Lawton. I have read one of his before - and enjoyed it enormously - but then, mea culpa, forgotten about him. Alas, his books are unlikely to appear in paperback in amongst the sort of 'pulp fiction' in which I indulge. For a start they are highly literate, not in a phony, high falutin' way, but just in excellent clear English laced with vivid description. Also, he has the knack, shared with the better sort of playwrights, of being able to 'speak' in the manner of his characters. His 'hero' is Frederic Troy, the younger son of a Russian emigre who fled his country at the revolution and prospered mightily in England to the point where he now owns a newspaper and is on friendly terms with Churchill. His eldest son works for the newspaper as a correspondent in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss - and it is this era and the consequent outbreak of war in which the novel, Second Violin, is set. The younger son, Frederic, rebels against the life-plan designed for him by his father and instead of attending university he opts to join the Metropolitan Police, beginning as a beat constable in Stepney, about as far removed from his upper crust upbringing as he could get. His education and intelligence are quickly rewarded by promotion to the Murder Squad.
The book resembles Tom Wolfe in the way it ranges back and forth over a huge gallery of characters of all classes and many different nationalities. He also reminds me of Alan Furst (than which etc., etc.) at his best in the way he invokes the period and the places in the late '30s and early '40s. I was amused to read in his own words that Lawton "hates tories" because it is obvious from this book that he is deeply conservative - with a small 'c'. In one passage, one of his characters, a Jewish refugee banged up in an internment camp on the Isle of Man, launches into an emotional, heartfelt paen of praise for England and the English. It was, I think from personal childhood memory, an accurate depiction of "the way we were" with the accent on 'were'! This passage might have over-stepped into sentimentality but at the end of it Lawton introduces a suitably sardonic response from a Cockney tailor who has often felt the rougher end of the arm of the English law.
I do urge you to try Lawton's books although I think you will find it easier to find him in the library rather than the W. H. Smith!
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