a fantastic novel
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i have just this second finished the last page of this and i was so sorry it had to end, although it finished at exactly the right time. This writer has a gift, a gift that makes the reader want to love and experience things that they wouldn't normally. He digs deep into the human condition and shows exactly how it feels for a love affair to go wrong, i think Ross is brilliant and i look forward to reading more of his work!
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A brilliant evocation of a cold, grey England between the wars
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Of Love and Hunger is one of the finest examples of the literature of the pre-war years. Its setting is a cold, grey England in which the danger of war is seen as secondary to the danger of a postal order not arriving, where the money for every round in the pub has to be borrowed off a mate and the best hope of covering your rent is a winning bet against a sucker.
Richard Fanshawe is a deeply human character, scraping a living as a vacuum-cleaner salesman while dreaming vaguely of being a writer. Every day he must indulge in another petty chisel or minor con in order to get by. The worst happens to him when the friendly and decent Derek Roper asks him to look after his wife, the dark and desirable Sukie. The pair embark on an unsatisfactory affair that seems to precipitate a series of crises in Richard's life as he loses his job and his home.
Containing fabulous comic set-pieces, including Richard and Sukie's date at a dismal, small-town zoo, Richard's eternally-thwarted attempts to avoid his landlady and wonderful interludes at the school for vacuum-cleaner salesmen, Of Love and Hunger is both a witty and sensitive evocation of a world now passed.
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Beautifully written and stunningly convincing
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I have just finished reading this book and found it enchanting and one of the finest novels I have read in a long time. The characters are wonderfully constructed, especially the two central characters Fanshawe and Sukie, whose affair comes about in such an understandable and believable way that I felt each emotion in the pit of my stomach.
Julian McClaren Ross never tries to do too much with his writing or the story itself and his style reminded me of Charles - it's easy to believe that he was perhaps an influence on Bukowski.
I wish there was more of JMR's writing available, on this evidence everything he ever wrote should be published.
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Atmospheric slice of pre-war England.
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I was drawn to this book because it sounded similar to Patrick Hamilton's "Hangover Square", a book I like so much I re-read it every couple of years. I wouldn't personally say it was as good as Hamilton's novel, simply because it doesn't possess the same seering emotional intensity which runs through "Hangover Square", and which can at times make it such a disturbing read. "Of Love And Hunger" is an engaging piece though, about a guy called Richard, newly back from working in Madras, with a secret yearning to be a writer, but instead having to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door in a dreary seaside town. When a colleague, Derek Roper, gets a job on a cruise liner he asks Richard to keep his attractive wife Suki company whilst he's away (which seems an incredibly naive thing to do!). At first Richard doesn't like Suki, but soon finds that he's actually in love with her, which is usually the way. Like "Hangover Square" this is set in the months running up to the Second World War. It was written in 1947 though and this can make some of the pre-war references sound overtly self-conscious. We get a lot of references to "that Hitler" and "that Mussolini". Perhaps it's just me, but I found that with it being written in 1947 it didn't quite have the immediate feel of people living on the edge of the abyss, not knowing exactly what horrors were to come. Nevertheless this gives an intricate detail of day-to-day life in a bygone age. A time when there was nowhere to go after 10 o'clock at night, where one of the sales reps is so hard-up he lives off raw onions and has to keep his coat on all the time because he's sold part of his suit, where people lived in genteel but shabby boarding-houses, and where wealthy people living in more upmarket suburban villas still had live-in servants. I like this kind of book because it's a good riposte to all the oldies who would have us believe that this era was some kind of golden utopia for "Daily Mail" readers, where there was no crime or dodgy dealing, and everybody was thoroughly clean-living and highly moral! It's also laugh-out-loud funny in parts, particularly the dismal small-town zoo where Richard takes Suki on a date, and the training-school for vacuum cleaner salesmen. Think of a sort of 1930s version of "The Office"!
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