Fowlers End is in London's outer suburbia and is quite possibly one of the most hellish places imaginable (geographically in the Edmonton/Ponders End area): a steel tube factory, a glass factory, the smokiest railway terminal in London, and a hideous chemical plant. It is in Fowlers End that Sam Yudenow, the proprietor of the Pantheon cinema, employs Daniel Laverock who, despite a ferocious appearance, is an educated middle class family failure, to manage the place. The story is told from Daniel Laverock's point of view. That said, there really isn't much of a story and the book is filled with dialogue, particularly from the memorable Sam Yudenow, whose mangled cockney yiddish is peppered with eclectic cliches, aphorisms, sayings etc. that have to be read to be believed. The extent to which you might enjoy this book will depend upon your tolerance for pages of this stuff. I thought it was amusing and readable.There are numerous other colourful and distinctive characters that populate the tale: Copper Baldwin (another Cinema employee), Godbolt (Yudenow’s business rival and nemesis), June Whistler (Laverock’s girlfriend), the Greek brother and sister, Costas and Kyra, who run Yudenow’s cafe, and many more. All of them are idiosyncratic, well drawn, and funny.This is the second book I have read by Gerald Kersh (the first was "The Angel and The Cuckoo") and I enjoyed both. Both books extensively feature London and, in both, Kersh evokes a version of the city that I recognise. A London of ordinary people trying to survive in a harsh environment.Set in the 1930s, and published in 1958, I'd say if you like books about London, particularly those set in the interwar period about ordinary working people, then this is well worth a read.
A strange, smart, fun and overly-long book. While not among Kersh's best, it still radiates real human heat and light, it still sparkles with keen wit and detail. While definitely from Kersh's later period (1957), Fowler's End seems to be in the transition period - before he went into stranger and more speculative territory, yet long after he ever had a chance to be a major literary star with his realistic war novels (which were great). His obscurity is because his subject matter is gritty, robust and relentlessly human, cynical but not pessimistic, with an appreciation for the grimy, shifty, grasping spirit of man - and this type of fiction is perennialy out of fashion. I am slowly finding more and more Kersh to read, and my appreciation and understanding of both his real observational and literary genius grows. However, Fowler's End is for Kersh completists only, and the gritty, ethnic, slummy, grimy, conniving, chancing, shifty, subject matter is better explored in The Thousand Deaths of Mr. Small(1951), where Kersh's earlier character Solly Schwartz seems to greatly inform the ridiculously entertaining Sam Yudenow (both cockney/yiddish Dickensian grotesqueries). There were many great passages and moments of truly great inventiveness (and to think, hardly anybody has ever or will ever appreciate them), but the book is still a bit bloated and could have been sharpened and boiled down to a more precise, muscular and visceral experience. So, a bit long, but the keen eye and masterful mind of Gerald Kersh remains intact.
