The book starts on 7th December 1962. So where was I? I was very nearly eighteen and halfway through my last year at school, studying (not very hard) for my three A-Levels. Here, the country doctor Eric Parry is visiting patients. His wife Irene is pregnant and finding it hard to motivate herself, even though she was always known as a hard worker. Eric then visits the asylum where a patient has committed suicide on the pills he prescribed.
Across the field from their home live Bill and Rita (also pregnant). trying hard to make a go of their farm. Of course, Irene and Rita become friends. This, for me, was the best part of the book, as they talk about their lives with lots of personal stuff. (When one of them "tries to settle on the dial for Radio Luxembourg. The signal came and went", (it took me back to our old radio). Not sure she would be listening to the American Marcie Blane singing "Bobby's Girl", as in this country it would have been Susan Maughn. There is a lovely conversation with Rita when Bill says, "Posh people think my father's a jumped-up little immigrant, which he is. They'd send him back if they could work out where he came from."
A week later we hear about a crucial part of the story when Eric has a secret tryst with Alison. Meanwhile Rita and Irene are off on a trip to the cinema. "A year from now it'll be bingo." How right they were. Boxing Day is the day of the party, and everyone is there. Another marvellous chapter. Crucially, snow is on the way, and that historic weather event is central to the rest of the book. But it's Irene's discovery of what her husband was up to and what she does about it that I found less than enthralling. So the last third I found is all a bit of a jumble. The ending, though, is very unexpected, even traumatic, but with a sense that there will be something closer in the future for the two couples.
This is one of David Lodge's very early novels, more of a novella of only 160 pages. It was written quickly in 1964, during a year in America while on leave from his job at the University of Birmingham. Adam Appleby is twenty-five and already has three children and is agonising whether a fourth is on the way. Catholicism, and its teaching about birth control, plays a stern and worrying role. Adam does not even have a proper job, as his studies take him every day to the Britich Museum.
Each day he starts off with good intentions, but somehow the fates are against his studies. What follows is a series of what might be termed 'comedic misadventures', but with an unexpected and highly unlikely bonus at the end. The book is written with style and the intelligent prose the author honed over the years.
It's the spring of 1963. (I have "A"-level exams about to start.) George Smiley is recently retired from the Circus, the UK's intelligence service. Settling down happily with his wife Anne. Until he is needed back because he is the one best placed to find out what has happened to Mr Banati. He runs a literary agency with his assistant Sussanah Giro. She comes face to face with Miki who was about to assassinate said Banati but changes his mind after the latter has done a bunk.
So a reasonable beginning is followed by a turgid first third of the book. This is not easy reading. There are periods when we get a long backstory of a new character. Even near the end this also happens. There is no momentum to the story. It all seems a bit pointless and difficult. There is hardly any plot, and nothing much happens. Even a predictable chase near the end is over so quickly. We end up first in Berlin and then in Vienna, the author trying to emulate his father's fascination for Eastern Europe of the sixties.
Is it that the book is so poorly written that I was glad when it was finished? It took me so long to read, especially the last third. It never takes me three weeks to read a book just under 300 pages. I was glad when it was all over.
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