Angel Pavement by J.B. Priestley – A Review

Published: 1930
Pages: 460

Priestley wrote Angel Pavement as a response to what became Great Depression. The novel is set in the sales office of a company that sells veneers. The company doesn’t seem to manufacture anything, but imports veneers and sells them. I think Priestley himself wasn’t entirely sure what the company does. Whatever it does, it doesn’t do it terribly well. The company is saved by the arrival of a man with access to cut-price veneers produced in Eastern Europe. The novel examines the effect this has on the staff and the owner of the business.

Each person working in the office represents a different level of society and Priestley shows their home lives with a bit more precision than their working lives. The owner of the company lives comfortably in a serviced flat in the west of London. He and his wife have friends round for dinner and have servant troubles. The finance manager lives with his wife and two teenage children (both at work), in a terraced house. The typist lives in a woman’s hostel whose occupants are constantly changing. The clerk lodges in the house of a couple who are only a little better off than he is. Each of them has a very precise address in different parts of London, underlining their social status.

There’s a fair amount of anti-semitism and misogyny in the book, which troubled me. Both were probably endemic at the time Priestley was writing, but from a man who made much of his social conscience, they’re hard to swallow. At a pinch, the anti-semitism could be passed off as reflecting the views of his characters, although I don’t think that’s the case. The misogyny is all his.

The novel is very long. Too long, I think. The third quarter is quite dull. In comparison, the final quarter is a whirlwind of action. I think I would have enjoyed it more if the actions leading to the climax made more sense. Unfortunately, I can’t explain why this was a problem without giving away the ending and I don’t like to spoil books for other people.

As a bit of social history, it’s an interesting book to read. If you want to know more about the importing of veneers into England in the late 1920s you’ll need to look elsewhere.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon

2019 Week Forty-Seven

Last week I complained about nothing happening in Angel Pavement by J.B. Priestley. It was a premature complaint and the final hundred or so pages were full of incident. I have finished the novel and it has left me, I think, disappointed. It’s full of period detail, which is interesting. Priestley admitted, though, that he got almost everything wrong about the business of Twigg and Dersingham, the company for whom the main characters work.  The office life he described, however, was still recognisable to someone who started work in an office 50 years after the period in which the novel was set.

Finishing Angel Pavement has given me more time to read Antonia Fraser’s Gunpowder Plot, which I left before I’d reached the halfway point. It’s the summer of 1605 and the plotters are putting their plans, such as they were, into action. I say ‘such as they were’ since Fraser insists that they didn’t really have any plans beyond blowing up parliament and making James I’s daughter the puppet ruler. They didn’t even seem to have any idea about whose puppet she would be.

I’ve finally read a story by Eudora Welty that I enjoyed. It’s Moon Lake, a story about two girls and the Boy Scout lifeguard at a girls’ summer camp. Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s a coming of age story, of which I’m not normally fond, but I was predisposed to enjoy it by the appearance of the lifeguard, who features as a sickly boy in an earlier story in the collection. It was reassuring to know that he grew out of his illness. This single story doesn’t redeem the whole collection in my eyes, but it does make the prospect of the remaining 300 pages a little less terrifying.

We’re almost into December, which means it’s time to start thinking about books for next year’s Reading the Classics Challenge. I have some ideas, but I’ve misplaced one of the books I was intending to include. That’s what comes of having too many books.

Books read in challenge: 10
Books read in year: 44

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon

2019 Week Forty-Six

I’m still struggling through The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. There’s more to read than I ‘ve already read and the stories are getting longer. They’re also getting more obscure. The last one that I read climaxed when a man, reaching the front door of a house, turned and ran away without doing anything.  The story is told in a humorous way by one of the town gossips, but it’s a lot of fuss about nothing.

It’s not all plain sailing with Angel Pavement either. Like many novelists before and after, Priestley has become bogged down in the middle. In the first hundred or so pages, it didn’t matter that nothing happened. There were characters to get to know and their lives to understand, and that was enough. By two-thirds of the way through a novel, it’s not unreasonable to expect something to happen. To be fair two tiny things, of a negative nature, have happened and one character has ignored something that will doubtless turn out to be very important. I don’t pick it up as readily as I did before.

Tom Holland’s Millennium continues to delight. He draws together events happening across Europe that don’t appear at first glance to be connected. I’m finding the early days of the Holy Roman Empire far more interesting than I expected.

Books read in challenge: 9
Books read in year: 43

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon

2019 Week Forty-Five

Angel Pavement by J. B. Priestley is the penultimate book on my list for the Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge. I’m more than a quarter of the way through it, but there’s still no real indication of what it’s about, although I suspect it’s going to be as depressing in its way as The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.  It presents a group of office workers at the beginning of the Depression. Some of them worry about retaining their jobs, but others don’t. The company they work for is struggling, but appears to have been saved by a man with a shady background. I can’t help but think it’s not going to end well. Despite that, it’s a joy to read. The prose is humorous and entertaining, and the characters are well-drawn, if unattractive.

The best thing I can say about The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty is that I’m still working my way through them. In this case, the beautiful prose doesn’t help.

In other reading, I’ve begun Millennium by Tom Holland. It’s an account of the, more or less, two centuries either side of the first millennium. Holland’s proposition is that there was a change at that time that still affects all of us. I’m looking forward to learning more.

Books read in challenge: 9
Books read in year: 43

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon

2019 Week Forty-Four

I have finished Classical Literary Criticism and I enjoyed Aristotle’s treatise much more than those of Horace and pseudo-Longinus. There will be a review later. I still have two and three-quarter books to go in the Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge. All three of them are over 400 hundred pages long. Fortunately, Angel Pavement, by J. B. Priestley, looks as if it will be fairly straightforward. The first chapter, introducing the office workers at Twigg and Dersingham, reminds me of parts of Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayer, written around the same time (late 20s/early 30s). This was also set in an office in London. Drug smuggling is an important element of Murder Must Advertise, while 250 cigars are smuggled into London in the prologue of Angel Pavement. I’m hoping there won’t be any further similarities.

In other reading I’ve finished La Nuit des Temps. I realised quite early that I’d read it before, not because I recalled the story, but because I underline words I don’t know when I read French novels so that I can look them up later. I’ve underlined words to the end, but none of the story was familiar. I’m not surprised, as it’s not a great story. Too many people do too many things that defy logic, which weakens it. On the plus side, I’ll gain a vocabulary of French words that might come in useful the next time I read some French science fiction, unless I don’t get round to looking them up, which is what happened last time.

Books read in challenge: 9
Books read in year: 42

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon

Goodreads Challenge 2019 Part 1

It’s December, which means it’s time to think about the books for next year’s Reading the Classics Challenge.

These are the rules for the challenge:
Only six of the 12 books selected are required to be Classics based on the Group’s definitions. At least 3 books from the Old School category (published before 1900) and 3 books from the New School category (published between 1900 and 1999). The other six and your two alternates can be any genre or age you wish to read.

For next year I’m choosing books that have been on my shelf for some time. I think two of the three I’m listing here have been there for 20 years and one has been there for 30.

These are the books I’ve chosen for the 1900 to 1999 section:

• Angel Pavement by J.B. Priestley
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

Angel Pavement dates from 1930, Their Eyes Were Watching God from 1937, and the Collected Stories from 1939 to 1980.

Having told myself to read shorter books next year following the mammoth City of God, Doctor Zhivago and The Decameron, plus a couple of chunky biographies, I discovered that one of these books is over 600 pages long. I’m going to stick with it, though.

Of the three authors, I’m only familiar with J.B. Priestley, having read two of his plays. I’m looking forward to getting to know authors I haven’t read before.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon