Status: Complete

Recommend: Yes

Review: Just a good story. Enough suspense to keep me reading, mixed with plenty of amazing quotes (as you can see below) that made me either chuckle or say "daaaaaamn" frequently. The theme is class battle - really how the rich and poor are similar in many respects, on the same side of the battle with the middle class.

In the end, the players change and the struggle continues with new faces. Reflects my philosophy when arguing against uniqueness or superlatives of current events. I find it more likely that what we think is unique or maximally great/awful can usually be seen as a continuation of a trend through centuries, perhaps just with different technology. At our core, we today are the same as humans were a thousand years ago, just with different distractions. We are not witnessing the most divisive this, or a completely unexpected that; it's all been done before. Not to say that i) we can't learn or change from the past, or ii) enjoy the hell out of the experience nonetheless (instead of passively accepting the inevitable), but let's cut the extreme talk.

Quotes:

An accident had brought him here; but there were no accidents - instinct was offered expression by a hollowing of chance, and impulse seized it. You didn't choose, you were chosen, claimed by an impulse that knew more than wisdom did of pain. (pg. 22)

He had always hated public houses; they were dirty and uncongenial, the haunts of resignation, attracting men whose loneliness was not improved by their meeting one another. They talked inaccurately about the world, swapping cheerless opinions. (pg. 29)

It was all easy, and if there was blame it was in taking advantage of the simplicity of it. He had not known it would end like this, on a dimly lit path above Peckham. He had thought he would feel triumphant, but he was only angry and his fingers stank of error. It was furiously petty; the man was worth nothing; no one knew. But he was not sorry. The memory of a thing not done was worse than any deed. He had never wanted to go back, and now he had proved he couldn't. (pg. 35)

In winter it was tolerable; it had a bleakness Mr Gawber liked. The cold rain composed it, blew the newspapers into corners, restored the black shine to the street and kept the limpers indoors. Rain tidied it and gave London back some of her glamour, even some of her youth: the city was designed for grim weather, not crowds. (pg. 37)

Norah said, "We'll have a good holiday, you'll see." He hated the word. He didn't want a holiday's brief deception of well-being...Holidays required skills Mr Gawber did not possess: pounding posts into the sand; humping and unflexing beach-chairs; acting as a waiter - with a clumsy tea-tray - for Norah. He endured it, praying for it to end, wishing the skies to darken and those families to be rained on...The holiday, that rest at Polzeath, had exhausted him, and though Norah still spoke of it with pleasure it had taken two weeks at Rackstraw's [Ed note: his place of employment] for him to regain his former grip on things. (pg. 41)

But symbols are a bad substitute for reality-they're always the wrong size. Go the whole way or don't go at all. Set the bastards on fire, don't pick their pockets. (pg. 47)

It was simple enough, but everything was simple as long as you stayed anonymous : the man who had been told everything was safe because he was dead. (pg. 61)

Certitude unmarked by doubt was suspect, a trap, and he had been proved wrong too recently not to pause. (pg. 66)

Two homeless old men bumped their belongings down the stairs in prams, like demon nannies with infants smothered under teapots and ragged clothes. (pg. 109)

They were acting out their strength, celebrating their petty hatred. (pg. 119)

He wondered if he was mad, then dismissed the thought. (pg. 157)

He wanted more, but he was tempted by less, and he sometimes felt this, passing the window of a south London parlour and envying the people inside having tea with their elbows on the table...But what kept him from pushing the reverie further was not that it was a retreat from the life he had planned for himself but that underlying this obvious feeling was a smaller one : pity, the feeblest mimicry of love. (pg. 171)

It was always like this : it broke her in two and one half hid from the other, like shame from pride. (pg. 185)

Outside, Lady Arrow said, "In my favourite novel there's a lovely scene here in Greenwich - an outing, like this. Do you know Henry James?"
"Never heard of him."
"That's much better than knowing his name and not reading him." (pg. 185)

"The word people is so bald," said Lady Arrow. "People - that's what politicians say. Who are they, the people?"
"They're, like, mainly the straights, aren't they?" said Brodie. "It's everyone except the freaks." (pg. 190)

Yet it was as if by degrees he was waking to the true size of his family and seeing it as so huge and branched it included his enemy. To harm any of them was to harm part of himself. A family quarrel : if he cut them he bled. (pg. 197)

Hood said, "I've always been suspicious of people who rap about their childhood. It's just a cheap way of avoiding blame." (pg. 201)

I know, but it wouldn't bother me if you did. A man sleeps with your wife. It hurts at first - that's pride. But then you realize what he's putting up with and you almost pity the poor bastard. (pg. 205)

To live abroad was to create a mythology about yourself, more than a new personality - a liberating fantasy you could believe in, a new world. (pg. 217)

He had also feared possession, dependency, complication, blame, any reduction of his freedom, any disturbance to hers. Sex, an expression of freedom, made you less free : the penalty of freedom was a reverie of loneliness. To act, he knew, was to involve himself; no act could succeed because all involvement was failure; and love, a selfish faith, was the end of all active thought - it was a memory or it was nothing. (pg. 251)

"You're a pig," she said. "You hate women."
"I'm liberated," he said. "I treat women the same as men." (pg. 255)

Hood saw black fingermarks on the breadslice. (pg. 269)

For every one who used the city as an occasion to perform, a thousand chose it as a place of concealment. (pg. 271)