A confident young woman describes work, love and friendship in this quirky yet addictive tale of 1960s London. English poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels and two well received collections of poetry, before sinking into obscurity in the mid-1970s. She suffered some personal traumas, converted to fundamentalist Christianity and then turned savagely on her own literary legacy. Legend has it that she frequented libraries, hunting down copies of her own novels and burning them. Her new found faith told her they were the work of the devil. The Bloater, her 1968 novel, was quickly written in four weeks with the express purpose of creating a bestseller that would bring in some easy money. Reading this quirky, idiosyncratic novel today, one can only assume she was delusional. The Bloater is a good page turner, with punchy dialogue and a well rounded cast of characters. But it doesn't strike as something bound for commercial success. The plucky narrator, Min, is a sound engineer at the BBC working on various esoteric audio projects. She's married to George, a paper cutout of a husband, hardly taken seriously by Min and of no erotic value. The real love interest of the story is the eponymous “bloater”, a chunky sized opera singer with a magnetism all of his own. Min is both attracted and repulsed by Carlos (the singer's actual name). She plays a flirtatious game of witty jousting with the somehow comically sensuous Bloater, sure to always win as she has no intention of succumbing sexually. It's all an energetic word game, any erotic tension between the two playing out more in Min's head than reality. Indeed, while Min is not an entirely unreliable narrator, her brassy, overly confident voice subsumes everything. This is a story told very much from her perspective. It's hard to place this out-of-the box slice of 1960s London, but perhaps fellow poet Stevie Smith's first novel, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) is a good place to start. Like The Bloater, it has a unique authorial voice that only a poet could create, describing Smith's circle of friends and political views. The Bloater is a snappy breath of fresh air, a mischievous and delicious frolic. New fans may pray that Vintage sees fit to publish more of her work. The Bloater, by Rosemary Tonks. Published by Vintage Classics. $22.99 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
|
AuthorNorth Melbourne Books Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
|