Hi

My E-mail address id Dmcvitt@googlemail.com, but I am a notorious non-checker of in-boxes.

I have checked out 'Love on the Dole' on the public library catalogue, they have it 'on stack' along with several other works by the author. I do intend to request it. The public libaries I use are the amazing City of London libraries, which is one compensation for having to work there.

I have just finished a Martina Cole novel. If I am a touch embarassed about reading J T Edson, I am positively ashamed of liking Martina Cole. Her books are seriously badly written and also morally offensive. She writes about the London underworld and really falls for the old myth of the good-hearted villains, the diamond geezers who might be armed robbers but but are always kind to old ladies, and always willing to dish out exemplary justice to child molesters and suchlike perverts who are always the luridly depicted viullains of her novels. But.. She is a story-teller. Somehow I always find myself getting interested, and wanting to know how things are going to come out. Not great literature, but it passes a train journey.

She claims to come from the background that she writes about, and I sort of half believe that. There are sometimes bits of description of life on council estates etc. that do ring true. But she undoubtedly embellishes. I believe she has claimed to have known the Kray twins, but I calculate that she must have still been at primary school when they went down.

Regards

David

posted by GeorgeBowling at 3:11 pm (EST) on Apr 16, 2008

Hi

I can see that I will have to move "Love on the Dole" a few places up my 'must get round to' list - which is a long, long list I have to say. I had somehow thought of it as a book of the thirties rather than the twenties, and its author as a bit of a one hit wonder. Ypour comments make it sound very interesting.

I am impressed that you have read over twnty Zolas. I think I have read half a dozen, all a very long time ago. I could never quite make up my mind whether I liked him or not. He is certainly a powerful writer, and I do take your point about his panoramic picture of society. Trouble is - I thought he was mad!

I call in evidence "La Bete Humaine", with its vast cast of characters, every one of whom has committed a murder, including the lass who derails a whole train, - the only exeption - almost through to the end -being the maniac who wants to murder any woman who arouses him.

I mean, it was a powerful book, and a rivetting read. But not the work of a man who was totally sane!

Yours provocatively

GB

posted by GeorgeBowling at 1:01 pm (EST) on Apr 6, 2008

Hi there

Yes, Edson is an eccentricity. You have to admire a man who managed to produce well over a hundred novels, especially as he was clearly not a natural writer, sometimes visibly struggling to get the words to express his meaning. Actually he is a thoroughly bad writer, and to put it at its mildest, his politics are not mine. I suppose reading him is a legacy of time spent working in Saudi Arabia many years ago - as a book-keeper, not as a rough-neck - when I read almost nothing but cowboy books, just because they were available.

I google his name from time to time, and often see things implying that he has passed on, but never any details. I would like to think he is living out a happy retirement, and still visiting the White Lion or some other hostelry.

My favourite Dickens novel is, I think, Bleak House. It has its weaknesses - a totally implausible heroine, for instance - but give a panoramic view of society in the 1850s with upper, middle, and pauper class characters (though none really from the working class) co-existing and over-lapping, but seldom encountering each other.Dickens had great talent for conjuring up a sinister atmosphere; at its best in Bleak House. A hundred times better than Hard Times.

The first two paragraphs, get straight into the atmosphere, though not the story...

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Perhaps you would care to give an opinion of "Love onthe Dole" which I note in your library? I is one of those many books I have never quite gat around to.

Cheers

GB

posted by GeorgeBowling at 3:19 pm (EST) on Mar 30, 2008