Books do Furnish a Room - post IV

Even when Widmerpool is partly begging his wife to come home you don’t feel too sympathetic towards him and even when he is clearly waiting on her as she has a fling he is still not a sympathy inducing character.

The reason is that all of those in the books so far he is the one that so clearly wanted power and so determinedly got it. To some extents though it is a hollow victory because he managed to get somewhere but lose other things on the way. Widmerpool doesn’t seem to value friendships and love in the way other people do.

Meanwhile the world of Fission comes tumbling down and in a few pages Jenkins summarises two years worth of history with it concluding that the magazine is no more and most of the characters involved have moved on or gone underground.

After the war this is still a London suffering from bombed out plots and the sings of austerity are most noticeable in the lack of taxis and the heavy descriptions of Trapnel borrowing money from people.

But on the flips side this is also a City out of uniform and as a result the war seems to have faded almost completely by the time the book ends.

A review will follow soon…