Bob, an ex-sailor who now earns his living as a waiter in a London pub, meets Jenny, a prostitute, and falls in love, although she scorns him, fails to show up for appointments, and takes the money he offers without ever giving anything in return.
Fundamentally, this is the same plot (even to the extent of referencing Maidenhead) as in Hangover Square, a later Patrick Hamilton book, although the outcomes are different (perhaps because the personality of the protagonist is different).
The setting feels authentic and the major characters are three-dimensional and vivid. I found myself telling Bob not to be such a sucker while at the same time understanding the dreadful inevitability of his trajectory so, while not empathising with him, I was treating him as though he were real. Surely that is the hallmark of great writing.
Selected quotes:
- "the feeling ... which the unthinkingly upright citizen cannot help experiencing when face to face with the delinquent ... which is partly curiosity and partly disgust." (Ch 6)
- "Providence has arranged that we may sometimes get what we want but never want what we get." (Ch 9)
- "Having, like most of us, a congenitally decimal mind, he always enjoyed his money most when the sum was exactly divisible by ten." (Ch 9)
- "Bob had been to sea, and his behaviour had been neither eccentric nor snobbish in foreign ports" (Ch 9) It is a very euphemistic way of saying that he had availed himself of the bars and brothels. I love the way that authors had to use euphemisms in those days.
- "He wore an expensive, shapely grey overcoat - rather too shapely; and he had large, handsome features - rather too large and handsome. His eyes were fine and blue. His voice was rich, deep, patrician - authentically beautiful. With all this there was an elusive shabbiness and meretriciousness about the man. In a word - an actor." (Ch 14)
- "God did not strike Prunella dead. (He never does this.) So Bob supposed she was speaking the truth. It also occurred to him that God, by diverse methods, had probably stricken Prunella enough already." (Ch 40)
- "The awful belligerence of the poor was to be heard." (Ch 42)
- "'Cooshay avec ma sirswar!' said Jenny. 'That's French! ... It means 'Where are you goin', deary?' 'No,' said Bob, 'not literally'." (Ch 43) I first heard the phrase 'voulez vous coucher avec moi, ce soir' on 'Lady Marmalade' the 1974 hit for LaBelle. I hadn't realised it was extant so much earlier! The Midnight Bell was published in 1929.
- "The glazed blue eyes of a carefree kleptomaniac." (Ch 44)
This book is the first in a trilogy called Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. It is followed by The Siege of Pleasure, and The Plains of Cement.
April 2023; 221 pages
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