The Lowlife - Alexander Baron

Alexander Baron  (1917-99) wrote fourteen novels and a dozen or so TV scripts.  The Lowlife, from 1963, is a classic London novel, in a line direct from Tom Jones to Oliver Twist.  The key to a London novel is the focus on the city within - or below - the city of commerce and pomp.  The scene here is Hackney, specifically not the East End as Baron points out, but a quietly fading community of bedsits and flats.

Everyone in Baron's fictional world is a lowlife.  Hero-narrator Harryboy Boas, is a gambler who occasionally does a bit of Hoffman pressing when he finds himself in need of cash.  Otherwise he stays in his room in Ingram's Terrace and reads classic novels or sleeps until it's time to go to the dog track.  Harryboy is forty-five years old and the nearest thing he has to a girlfriend is a West End courtesan rising forty.  Nobody in this world has a regular 'straight' job.  The nearest approximation is Harryboy's brother-in-law Gus, a bookmaker, and book-keeper Vic, who moves his family into the downstairs flat thus inciting the plot, who wants to qualify as a company secretary so he can indulge in what today we call insider trading.

The plot is seamless - it seems to be nothing yet it keeps on going, finally sparking into real jeopardy for Harryboy.  The sequence in which he very nearly gets his come-uppance only to (briefly) come up trumps is genuinely exciting.  The subsequent twist, coming out of nowhere as things do in real life, was beautifully achieved.

Baron's writing is simply magnificent, note-perfect throughout.  He sets out to evoke a world, familiar yet unknown, and does so completely.  His characters are all multi-faceted, right down to the cringing landlord and the courteous little gangster.  There are no stereotypes.  Everybody has value, even Vic's appalling wife Evelyn.

I adored this book and can't wait to get hold of another.  Strip Jack Naked, King Dido - the titles alone call out to me.

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.

The Siege of Sidney Street - Frederick Oughton

Ah, the forgotten art of the film tie-in, or novelisation. OK, you still get novel versions of film and TV franchises, but surely the days sare over when a British B picture warranted the commissioning of a Pan Original, no less, to add to the pleasure of those who enjoyed the movie. Yet here is one such, by the prolific Frederick Oughton, from an original script by Jimmy Sangster, whose How-to-Write-A-Movie book I reviewed last week, and the once famous London novelist, Alexander Baron, who I suspect is also reviewed on this blog.

Odd, though, that people should want a novel when the siege was a real event, only 50 years old at the time so well within living memory, and already the subject of many non-fiction books. The story is an absolute cracker - armed police and infantrymen exchanging gunfire with a small band of anarchists, already wanted for murder, holed up in a derelict tenement. Crowds came to watch as, famously, did the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. Indeed, Churchill's presence is likely one of the reasons that not absolutely everyone today knows about the Siege; certain elements would prefer we forget Churchill's penchant for shooting militants - and miners. Oughton - and I presume Sangster - hold back Churchill's arrival to the very last chapter, so naturally it is not an issue. The story is extremely well done, opening up the complex background through character interaction. The dialogue is effective and I noted that Oughton was very good at establishing location.

I haven't seen the film - I have no idea why the chap on the front, presumably Kieron Moore, is wearing a light-grey suit at least a decade out of period - but I absolutely devoured the book.

Count Luna - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Count Luna is an absolute work of genius by an extremely fine writer who is inexplicably under-translated into English.   Sadly, I have now read all three of the more-or-less available: this, plus Baron Blagge and I was Jack Mortimer.   My posts on the other two have had great responses and loads of clicks, so I don't see some enterprising publisher starts digging into Lernet-Holenia's back catalogue.

Like the others, Luna is a work of wit and imagination.   It also hinges on a serious subject: how does a vanquished people deal with its guilt over the crimes against humanity committed in their name?

Alexander Jessiersky, a third generation millionaire of Polish extraction, lives in a palace in central Vienna.   He has a beautiful wife and loads of children.   He is not especially interested in the family transport business but it functions prosperously without him.   Before the war, however, the board of directors wanted to buy a property owned by the down-at-heel aristocrat Count Luna.   Luna wouldn't sell - it was the last of his inheritance - and the board of directors therefore reported him to the Gestapo who hauled him off to a concentration camp.   Jessiersky had nothing to do with it - but he knows he should have intervened and used his veto.   Guilt has gnawed at him throughout the war and after.   During it, he tried to send Luna money and food.   Now he is obsessed with the notion that Luna has survived his ordeal and is back in search of revenge.

Jessiersky is an obsessive researcher, happiest in his well-stocked private library.   He delves, develops theories - and goes quietly mad.   He takes to killing people.   He flees Austria and ends up in the catacombs of Rome.   We know this from the outset - his disappearance below ground in the Church of Sant' Urbino is where Lernet-Holenia starts his fable.   The interest - the game - is how he came to be there.   The genius is that Lernet-Holenia doesn't leave it there.   He takes us with Jessiersky into what happens next, which is something rather beautiful.

Lernet-Holenia writes like a dream.   He juggles complex ideas like guilt and death and the possible hereafter with deceptive ease.   Jessiersky has done no more than thousands of his compatriots did.   His only sin is that he failed to do something.   The outcome of his inaction may not have been too terrible.  But what Jessiersky does to himself and others fifteen years later is terrible.   Terrible yet empathetic and therefore sad.   We laugh and we sigh but always with sympathy.   Which is what makes Count Luna an absolute masterpiece.

Baron Bagge - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Lernet-Holenia is a key figure in Twentieth Century Austrian literature, badly underpublished in English translation.   I looked on the British Library catalogue and only came up with four of his works in English.   I cannot understand this.   I jumped at the chance when I saw Count Luna was newly added to Penguin Modern Classics and that Baron Blagge had been republished to keep it company.   Waterstones only had Blagge but I was fine with that.

Blagge is a short novella or long short story.   The similarities with the stories of Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen are everywhere.   Upper class characters who find themselves overwhelmed by a vaguely supernatural situation.   Blagge is a junior officer in Count Gondola Dragoons.   In 1915 they find themselves in pursuit of the Russians in the Carpathian mountains.   There is a battle on a bridge.   The dragoons found themselves in the village of Nagy-Mihaly where Bagge is greeted by the beautiful Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, daughter of the best friend of Bagge's mother.   The mothers have long conspired to marry their children, but they have never met.   Yet Charlotte somehow knew that Bagge was coming today.   It's very odd.

And the oddness is the beauty of the book.   It is beautifully written and exactly the right length to do the story justice.  The characters are wonderfully realised, especially the supporting cast - Bagge's touchy superior Semler, and Charlotte's father with his damp handlebar moustache.  I absolutely adored it.   Exactly the sort of book I am constantly on the lookout for.   I must have more.

I Was Jack Mortimer - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 I cannot fathom why the prolific Lernet-Holenia hasn't been translated into English more often.   It seems to me only Baron Blagge (reviewed below), Count Luna and this are available.   He wrote a novel about the Count St Germain - that's obviously of wide interest, so what are we waiting for?

Anyway, I Was Jack Mortimer is very different to Blagge and Luna.   It is a contemporary (1933) satirical take on US gangster thrillers.   In that sense it shares the fantastical tone of Blagge.   Lernet-Holenia gives us a dark farce in which old school mores clash with modern mobsterism.

Cab driver Ferdinand Sponer picks up a fare at the station in Vienna.   The passenger asks to be taken to the Bristol Hotel.   Sponer heads across town.    He hears what he assumes is a truck backfiring.   It occurs to Sponer to ask which Bristol Hotel the man wants, the New Bristol or---   The man doesn't answer.   Because he's been shot dead by someone who must have hopped onto the cab's running board, done the dirty deed, and hopped off again - something only really possible with interwar cars.

Sponer does the decent thing.   He tries to interet the police in the murder, but can't manage to grab their attention.   He therefore decides to dispose of the body and get on with life.   He drives aimlessly around the city, even finds time to pop into a coin-op bar (what happened to those?) and chat up a couple of girls.   Before dropping his passenger into the Danube he has the sense to go through the dead man's papers.   Turns out he's Jack Mortimer, a banker from Chicago.   We subsequently learn more: Mortimer's bank specialises in laundering Mob money; he is or rather was a notorious lady's man.

It occurs to Sponer that he should go on the run, start a more interesting life somewhere else.   Meanwhile, why not make the most of the opportunity to enjoy the high life of Vienna?   He assumes Mortimer's identity and takes Mortimer's room at the right Bristol Hotel.   Also in town are Mortimer's latest conquest and her affronted husband...   The night doesn't turn out anything like Sponer anticipated.

It's all great fun.   The style is certainly modern for the time.   I like the way Sponer's imaginary police interrogations are handled.   I'm not 100% convinced by the translation but I don't speak or read German, so can't really criticise.   The proof reading was astonishingly bad - bloopers on the first page!!?  Get a bloody grip, Pushkin Press!