Julius
Julius
“Winter of ’73 and a skinny, bookish thirteen-and-a-half-year-old is lying on the floor of her lilac-wallpapered bedroom in Nottingham. Last week she took Frenchman’s Creek out of the library, the week before that Jamaica Inn - she was transported by the pure Cornish romance and excitement of them. Now here’s another Daphne du Maurier, one she hasn’t even heard of, fat and promising in its yellow, polythene-wrapped Gollancz cover. She flings herself down on the prickly nylon carpet and opens it enthusiastically.
And is plunged straight into a harsh and remorseless world of Paris under siege, starving peasants, Algerian child prostitutes, ruthless sex, cold murder and emotional sadism. I was, by then, quite a mature reader, but I’d never alighted on a novel as psychologically savage and uncompromisingly sophisticated as this one.
Of course at thirteen, I was far too inexperienced to glean many of Julius’s deeper and darker meanings. I knew nothing of men-female sexuality, still less of ...money, class, deprivation and war.MoreLess
And is plunged straight into a harsh and remorseless world of Paris under siege, starving peasants, Algerian child prostitutes, ruthless sex, cold murder and emotional sadism. I was, by then, quite a mature reader, but I’d never alighted on a novel as psychologically savage and uncompromisingly sophisticated as this one.
Of course at thirteen, I was far too inexperienced to glean many of Julius’s deeper and darker meanings. I knew nothing of men-female sexuality, still less of ...money, class, deprivation and war.MoreLess
Write Review:
User Reviews: