Perhaps I was expecting too much?  I had recently finished reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and, intrigued by Powell’s obvious admiration for Julian Maclaren-Ross––such that he based his character X. Trapnel on him––I thought that I would make Of Love and Hunger my next read.

Perhaps it is impossible to follow A Dance to the Music of Time?  Almost any book read after that is going to seem rather… minor in comparison.  And, when I say ‘minor’ I don’t mean to sound unqualifiedly derogatory.  Whereas A Dance to the Music of Time is a ‘major’ work in almost all considerations––scope; ambition; length––there are plenty of novels, which deliberately limit themselves to a much smaller setting, but which manage to punch above their weight in terms of storytelling nevertheless.

Of Love and Hunger is deliberately parochial in terms of its setting and characters: the vicissitudes of a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in a pre-WW2 Sussex coastal town.  However, for me, it doesn’t ever greatly rise above this insular starting point. It sounds too much like the plot of a film that might have starred Robin Askwith.

Maclaren-Ross was himself a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in Bognor Regis during the same period.  Okay, ‘write what you know’, but his descriptions seem too closely drawn from real life such that they would more qualify for autobiography rather than fiction.

There is a slanginess to the narrative, capturing the language of the pub and the street, which might have been innovative in its day, but which now seems rather dated, and was better done by Patrick Hamilton, writing a decade or so earlier.

It is annoying, because I felt as though I really wanted to like Julian Maclaren-Ross’ writing; to champion him even, but I simply did not.

Maybe, I shouldn’t be so surprised.  X. Trapnel was not amongst my favourite characters in A Dance to the Music of Time.  Now, a novel written by Uncle Giles, that would be worth the entrance money.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow is suffering from post-ADTTMOT blues.