The Lowlife - Alexander Baron

 Alexander Baron (1917-99) was a genuine Jewish Londoner. a communisr and active anti-fascist in the thirties who, after serving throughout WW2, became a professional writer - journalist, novelist and screenwriter.   This beautiful new issue of The Lowlife (1963) from Faber Edition comes with an introduction by his fellow Hackney chronicler, the mighty Iain Sinclair.

Harryboy Boas is a professional gambler in his early forties.   He lives in a rented room in Hackney, spends his days in bed or reading classic novels and his nights at the dog track.   His entire life is devoted to gambling.   The money is not important.   If he has plenty, he spends it.   All he needs to get by is rent-money and food-money for local cafes.   He is not a drinker or a womaniser.   For the latter he has an arrnagement with Marcia, an upmarket prostitute who has the same attitude to sex that Harryboy has for gambling.   Long term aspirations for both involving building property portfolios, slums earmarked for clearance, that they will let out to immigrant families.

Meanwhile in the house in Hackney a young family have moved in downstairs, the Deaners, Vic and Evelyn and their spoilt demanding toddler Gregory.   Vic is bookkeeper for a local supermarket.   Evelyn is lower middleclass and expects greater things.   When the old lady who occupies the upstairs room across the landing from Harryboy dies, a black family take over.   They are helpful, friendly people but Evelyn has the prejudices of her class.   She wants out - a move to a better district.   Vic is weak.   He gives in to the pressure and embezzles money from his employer.   Following Harryboy's example, he stakes it all on the dogs and loses the lot.   Now he needs to repay his employer and get a deposit together for a new, better flat.    Harryboy has played the big man, making empty promises.   Now Vic is pressurising him to help...

This is a brilliant read, fizzing with life and ideas plus a penetrating social study of a world in transition.   Eighty years ago the Jews were East End pariahs, unwanted immigrants with alien appearance and mysterious customs.   Now they are upwardly mobile, united against the new wave of immigrants.   I hope there will be more reprints of Baron's novels.   In the meantime, I will be scouring the sellers of second hand books, online and in person.

[NOTE: This is one of those rare occasions when I have read and reviewed a novel twice.   You can link to my review from 2013 by clicking here.

Mother London - Michael Moorcock

Mother London is not what we expect of Michael Moorcock. That's our shortcoming, not his. He wrote Mother London in 1988 when he was absolutely at the top of his game, capable of writing absolutely anything. And here's the proof.


There's very little sci fi, but a load of fantasy. That's because Moorcock's three protagonists are on and off mental patients and we spend as much time as they do in the world of dreams. The London 'mother', insofar as there is one, is Mary Gasalee, a teenage mum who emerges from the ruin of her house in the Blitz, cradling her infant daughter. The moment she hands the baby to the ambulance crew she collapses - and remains in a coma for the next fifteen years. We enjoy her dreams which she spends largely with Hollywood stars - Merle Oberon is a particular dream friend and Ronald Colman keeps turning up unexpectedly. When Mary wakes she is in her middle thirties but still looks eighteen; everyone mistakes Mary and her daughter for sisters.


Recuperating in the hospital garden she meets Josef Kiss and does what women always do with Josef. We have already met Josef. He is an old style variety act - a mind-reader, albeit like Mary he can do it for real. In the war he made himself an ARP warden and a disarmer of unexploded bombs. This is how he met the eccentric Scaramanga sisters (in one of the best sections of the entire book). Since the war he does small character parts in film and on TV. He is best known as the face of frozen fish fingers. Josef is only sporadically mad and he occasionally books himself into various mental hospitals for rest and recuperation.


The third protagonist is David Mummery, a freelance journalist much younger than Mary and Josef. Josef, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the city, its legends and byways, is David's mentor, Mary his first love. David is not as strong a character as the other two and therefore carries very little of the narrative. I was thinking he was a mistake until I came to the very last section and realised why he was there.


Chronology in Mother London is prismatic. If it matters, we are told when we are in the chapter headings. We always know where we are - London - and are mainly specifically located by ancient pubs. There is no apparent rationale behind the ordering of the sections except at the beginning and the end. The beginning is the weekly get-together of the patients at a clinic. The end is at the Scaramanga's cottage which will replace it after Thatcher's cuts. In this fictional version of the 1980s Thatcher is very much PM but Secretary of State for Health is Josef's antithetical sister, Dame Beryl Male, whose husband is in charge of the mental hospital where the protagonists first meet.


There is a splendid backdrop of fleeting characters, of whom I especially enjoyed the Fox family of villains. Many of these background characters are gypsies, who seem to fascinate Moorcock. And why not? They have been in London, he reckons, since it was pontoons in the primeval marshland. The Matter of Britain is also here, the buried demigods Lud, Gog and Magog, and Bran. And the three protagonists, all to varying extents able to hear the thoughts of others, are assailed by wedges of stream-of-consciousness which we soon recognise as flags of manic episodes.


I was absolutely stunned by Mother London. It truly is a masterpiece of London fiction. You have to be mad to live there, of course, so all Moorcock's core characters are.