The Liberty Man
Quartet, London, 1973
dedication: For Edward Thorpe
The blurb on the back:
When Freda Mackenzie, eminently respectable young schoolteacher with a stockbroker father and a background of tennis, riding and university, meets Derek Smith, a big blond sailor from the East End of London, she tells herself that she sees him only as a challenge, that she simply enjoys watching his reactions as she introduces him to good food, good films, good music.
Best I can tell, this is the first novel by the great Gillian Freeman, but you wouldn't notice from reading it. It's a typically beautiful piece of writing and if the story is absurdly thin - middle-class girl meets working-class boy, er, that's it - then it matters not a jot. What you get is a pair of standard but closely observed characters working through the permutations of impossible love. And, even better, what you get is a virtual documentary of London in the post-Festival of Britain years. Here, for example, is our sailor hero experiencing Piccadilly at night:
We see the vacuity of the London stage immediately before Look Back In Anger, the nascent underclass of the East End, the would-be gentility of South Kensington bedsits, the furtive gay drinking clubs of Soho. In short, if you want to know what London was like before it began a-swingin', this is the place to be. Not as essential as some of Ms Freeman's other work, but still damn fine. Incidentally, Edward Thorpe, to whom the book is dedicated, was Ms Freeman's husband and is probably best known for his works on ballet. Not to me, obviously, since I know bugger all about ballet, but to those who do, he is.
ARTISTIC MERIT: 4/5
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