London Belongs to Me (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Establishing this does not come easily for Doris, but she convinces the reader and her parents that the world is changing and the clock is not going to stop.

I’d have yearly jaunts to Edinburgh (my other favourite place) for the festival, but I wouldn’t mind living in London. Sheltered and contented amongst the shelves of silent ledgers (‘E to Egg-’) at Creek Lane EC2; it is if he’d never been away. This entry was posted on June 17, 2009 by sharonrob in Entries by Sharon, Fiction: 20th Century, Fiction: general, Fiction: literary and tagged BBC, Kennington, London, Norman Collins, Wolf Suschitzky, World War 2. I'd just finished reading five novels by Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square, The Slaves Of Solitude, and the Gorse Trilogy); a biography of Patrick Hamilton (Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton); and a biography of Julian MacLaren-Ross (Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Julian Maclaren-Ross). I recently started reading Jose Saramago’s “A Brief History of the Seige of Lisbon”, and I thought it was very fine, but reading his very long sentences, I got just too tired, so after 60 pages, I switched to Amelie Nothomb’s “Tokyo Fiancee” which is only 170 pages and full of short sentences.

The other residents include the faded actress Connie; tinned food-loving Mr Puddy; widowed landlady Mrs Vizzard (whose head is turned by her new lodger, a self-styled 'Professor of Spiritualism'); and flashy young mechanic Percy Boon, whose foray into stolen cars descends into something much, much worse. Dulcimer Street, se11, could be regarded as the novel’s central character, though it is darling old Mr Josser – the man on the tram rather than the Clapham omnibus, who cries when he retires from his job as a lowly but loyal clerk in the City – who provides the book’s continuity. Sidney Gilliat however says Earl St John asked if Gilliat could use one of Rank's contract stars like Pat Roc, Margaret Lockwood or Jean Kent; Gilliat chose Roc as he had worked well with her on Millions Like Us.

The blackouts are vividly presented (“it had a sinister, almost solid, quality of its own, this blackout, so that you felt you had to carve your way through it, scraping and scooping out a passage as you went along”) and when Collins emphasises the carry-on attitude of Londoners during the war, it seems not so much heroic as dutiful (“[Mr Josser] had something else to think about. Norman Collins really brings his characters to life - I felt as if I knew them all intimately and really cared about their lives and various predicaments. If you enjoyed London Belongs to Me, you might like Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. On the contrary, another author would have made this into a trilogy, and one could easily have made an entire book out of either Mr Puddy’s culinary and occupational disasters, or of Percy Boon’s pipe dreams and depredations in the underworld, or the antics of Mr Enrico Qualito (aka, the slinking Squales) philandering amongst the (occasionally affluent) lonely spinsters and derelict widows of the spiritualist unions. Collins sees London undergoing constant renewal: ‘the Huguenots, the Jews … the French and Italians in Soho, Chinese in Limehouse, Scotsmen in Muswell Hill, the Irish round the Docks’.

The style this book is written is so well observed - its almost like having had a Big Brother camera in the house but 70 years earlier! London Belongs to Me is a love letter to London and even the most skeptical or cynical readers will surrender to the many delights of this compelling narrative. Ed Glinert in his introduction makes a sort of pre-emptive disclaimer for the novel (“simply entertainment … no rival to Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh”) – but who wants to read a 700-page novel by Graham Greene? A gigantic Dickensian epic about the lodgers in 10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, in the run up to the Second World War. The stories part and interweave and drop and pick up between characters in exactly the manner of a soap opera and just as addictively, so that the domestic drama of "will Mrs Josser like Doris's fiance's parents?These diversely ordinary people living at the same address, the other people whose lives they touch, all with their different desires and motives, It's a terrific read for an historical novel.

The novel’s sense of period and place is acute on London particular: the bustle and cosiness of the crowded City pubs at five o’clock on a winter’s day; the dreary boneshaking tram ride home to Kennington, via the Embankment and Lambeth; the invisible fault line of social status between the pretentious Smyths and the down-to-earth Jossers. small oily mermaids (reduced to) only tiny white fragments left clinging to the ingenious spring framework of fine bones’.Under the one roof are the Jossers - an clerk on the verge of retirement, his wife and their office worker daughter. I am now back at work and recently took a few days to read a 120-page novella, so I cannot guarantee that the level of service will continue uninterrupted!