of love and hunger [julian maclaren ross]

Sometimes the quality of a novel can be measured by the paucity of the action. Nothing happens, and yet you’re still gripped. Of Love and Hunger, with its pretentious title, is one of those. The story is banal. The South Coast of England, 1939. Richard Fanshawe is a disillusioned vacuum cleaner salesman, who falls in love with Sukie, the wife of a man who has asked him to keep an eye on her whilst he’s away at sea for three months. The affair is desultory and doomed. War breaks out. The end.

At some point you think, something’s going to happen, there’s going to be a twist, but there isn’t and it doesn’t matter. The novelist has managed to conjure up a time and a place and a way of thinking and that’s all that’s required. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic and that doesn’t matter either.  What remains is a surgical evaluation of the way people get on with one another, men and women, men and men, women and women. It gets under the surface and traces the undercurrents that permeate any conversation; the way in which when we converse, our speech is an echo chamber for our thoughts.

There might be a dissertation to be written on the role of the vacuum cleaner in 20th century British literature. Like Greene’s Wormold in Our Man in Havana, the vacuum cleaner industry permits Fanshawe to earn a living, albeit a marginal, desperate one. Nothing seems to sum up the era more than the well-educated, supposedly middle-class graduate, resorting to giving comical demonstrations of primitive vacuum cleaners to get by. The desperation of the times is also captured in Fanshawe’s listless amorality. But this is preferable to the scene at a provincial dance, where the South English burghers express their approval of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews in a manner which has terrifying echoes of contemporary Daily Mail mores. A ripple of fascism which hints at a different turn history might have taken. It almost feels as though everyone’s waiting for the war, which will be like pressing the reset button, creating a sense of order to replace the listlessness and re-establish some kind of moral compass. MacLaren Ross captures the time to a T. It doesn’t seem so very far from the world of Sartre’s Nausea, (which takes place just the other side of the Channel); only that the angst is kept permanently bottled up, existentialism always at arm’s length.

Of Love and Hunger might be a minor work, but it’s also a minor jewel. This is the word employed as scalpel, the writer as surgeon.