The Vodi - John Braine

 

The Vodi (1959) was Braine's second novel, successor to the seminal Room at the Top.  Braine was an Angry Young Man and so his is hero here, Dick Corvey.  Corvey is confined to a sanatorium with TB, which was a major plague in Britain as late as the 1950s.  He feels he is under a death sentence.  Even if he does recover, he can never hope to marry or find a decent job, such is the fear of contagion - even pub landlords keep special glasses for TB types and throw them away as unfit for use by normal people.

Everything in Dick's life has gone wrong all at once.  His father's business is on the skids, Dick's fiancee has deserted him for a normal, healthy man.  Dick childishly blames the bogey-woman he and his friend Tom dreamed up as schoolboys - Nelly, headwoman of the ratlike Vodi, who dwell in and the under the woods on the fringes of town.  Once Nelly has got her four teeth into you, she never lets go.

The novel is extraordinarily powerful,  Braine, who died in 1986, never equalled the success of Room at the Top, and was always defined by that book.  Ultimately he wrote a follow up, Life at the Top, and scripts for the TV version Man at the Top.  I had heard about The Vodi - mainly that it was not up to the Lampton saga.  Room at the Top I read and admired - and I was an absolute fan of Man at the Top with one of my favourite actors Kenneth Haigh.  But The Vodi is absolutely of the same standard.  Dick Corvey is not as iconic as Joe Lampton but the writing here is superb.  The descriptions of life in the industrialised North as it is about to begin its long slow death are captivating, those of the way we so recently treated TB sufferers are jaw-dropping.

Hurry On Down - John Wain

This is the book that is said to have started the Angry Young Men on their angry way.  Actually, it's more of a Movement thing, very slightly (1953) predating Amis and Larkin.  In essence, it's a classic English comic picaresque, the misadventures of Charles Lumley in the first year or so after leaving university.  What makes it different is that Charles has no mission (other than to find a mission) and sets himself firmly on a downward trajectory - accidentally becoming a window cleaner, car delivery driver (and crook), hospital orderly, chauffeur, nightclub bouncer and radio gag-writer.  What I especially liked was the dense quality of the writing.  I've always found Kingsley Amis somewhat glib and superficial whereas Wain seems to be always aware of the relationship between art and character.  There are some marvellous lines here, for example: "His life was a dialogue, full of deep and tragic truths, expressed in hoarse shouts by red-nosed music-hall comics."  Brilliant - a bona fide classic of the mid twentieth century.  This should be on the school curriculum.

And by the way, check out that superb cover art by Len Deighton.

The Crust on its Uppers - Derek Raymond

Patrick Hamilton meets Anthony Burgess and goes on a John Buchan-esque escapade across Europe - this 1962 one-off has to figure on any worthwhile list of 20th Century British classics.  There really is nothing like it, narrated in u first-person underworld cant by an unnamed toff-gone-bad.  How much is autobiographical?  Quite a bit - Raymond was himself privately educated, descended from wealth, and utterly debased, so much so that The Crust on its Uppers was originally published under his real name, Robin Cook.  Only his later books, notably the 'Factory' series, were pseudonymous because the world had become full of Robin Cooks (formulaic thriller writer, Labour politician etc).  The Factory novels are definitely on my must-acquire list.

If you like crime, if you like Augustan literature (I'm thinking Defoe and Fielding), if you are fascinated by social and cultural change in the era of the Angry Young Men, then I urge you to READ THIS BOOK!