Never read any of his books before but on the strength of this one I won't be reading anymore. I live in Belsize Park and the author reviews local eateries and wrote such a funny and damning piece on a local hotel which had a new chef and restaurant and knowing England's Lane well I had to take the plunge...He does write stream of consciousness pieces with his characters, the shopkeepers in the Lane, and it tweeks memories of products and brands commonplace in 1959 but to my mind it has little depth and is rather empty. Best bit is the author's description of what he feels a writer should be;
"The novel...is no more than a baggy contrivance, a ramshackle edifice without foundation-alluring only as is a tawdry bubble, a bright-painted Jezebel jammed and caked with gimcrack coincidence so as to insult the intellect, while peopled by the flimsiest shades that defy all absorption or credulity." Tongue in cheek and the Daily Mail says "May well be his masterpiece." ( )

I liked the cover and I really enjoyed the bits and pieces of social history. The plot was clever, as was the technique of recording characters' thoughts as if one were reading their minds. But that was also one of the problems I had, since I sometimes found it over-written and difficult to follow easily because some of the speech mannerisms were unfamiliar. However, what really lowered my opinion of the book was the not-so-subtle racism. I'm not sure if it was intentional (god forbid!) but in trying to represent attitudes and behaviours of the time, the author seemed to be endorsing them. I hope I'm not being unfair, and I realise that not every book ever written has to try to change the world, and that probably he was simply trying to be accurate, but the moments that made me very uncomfortable and unhappy could possibly have been balanced by acknowledging the presence of people of colour in Britain for a longer time (just a sentence or two!), but even more so, by making the black characters more multi-dimensional and real instead of just figures (and maybe giving the reader a glimpse into their thoughts). The straw that broke the camel's back was a reference to pawnbrokers as "yids". Anyway, that's my opinion! ( )

I can understand why many reviewers found this book difficult to read; the style, a series of internal monologues without natural divisions between them made me struggle and the fact that the language of the monologues was beyond the capability of some of the characters irritated me. But I got used to it and enjoyed the last 300 or so pages (yes, it is much too long for its relatively slender plot line. For those who don't know it, England's Lane is a real street in Camden, London and although I did not know it in 1959, this seems a very likely accurate portrait of it. Similarly the picture of London in 1959 is fairly realistic. ( )

L'idée est très bonne, l'approche des différents personnages intéressantes, les situations parfois inhabituelles, provocantes, voire choquantes. Mais que de bavardages inutiles ! ( )