Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
DJ Taylor
Corsair 2011
I very much enjoyed At The Chime Of A City Clock. In it Taylor, like Greene, Orwell, Patrick Hamilton, and Julian Maclaren-Ross, evokes well the atmosphere of shabbiness, seediness and potential violence of the thirties. It is to the last two that Taylor appears most indebted: his hero, like Bone in Hamilton’s Hangover Square, periodically returns to the domestic comforts and boredom of the home of an out-of-town relative, in this case his mother, and, like Fanshawe in Maclaren-Ross’s Of Love And Hunger, he is an aspiring writer scraping along selling cleaning products. The fact that his name is Ross and that Taylor records his thanks to “JM-R” at the end of the novel underlines this indebtedness. The novel works very well, although its admirable attention to the physical detail of the time and thus of homage to the work of his predecessors does, I think, distract from the story, which follows the usual lines of popular crime fiction of the time but fizzles out a bit at the end. In other words, it is perhaps too self-consciously a pastiche to be fully convincing in its own right. Having said that, its picture of London in the thirties, and of the penny-pinching atmosphere of the time, is very convincing indeed, and superbly well-done.
3 June 2011
http://www.djtaylorwriter.co.uk/
See also: Ask Alice
|
|
