Intoxication prose in search of human connection: a London novel
Booker-shortlisted writer, Michele Roberts’s latest 14th novel, pays homage to all London’s streetwalkers and literal writer from the likes of Dickens, Woolf.
In 1851 Joseph Benson is hired by journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew, to research for his groundbreaking newspaper articles about the working classes that will later form his magnum opus, London Labour and the London Poor.
Joseph interviewed City’s prostitutes to uncover reasons for their wanton criminality and lustfulness, on the presumption that such women are happily seducing married men in order to satisfy their own female desires.
Joseph investigates the inside story behind the streets for girls willing to talk to him. A contact directs him to Apricot Place, where a Mrs Dulcimer sits at the helm of a boarding house filled with unfortunate girls and women. She becomes Joseph’s main informant, and source of a story. In a contemporary narrative, Madeleine transform herself into a deliberate and self-aware student of the streets, in the tradition of Flaneur, after losing her job as an English professor, she moves across the river to Apricot Palace, turning her focus from literature to London.
Back in 2011, Madeleine, who is living in Mrs Dulcimer’s former kitchen ( the house split into flats), owns a turquoise plot inherited from her grandmother, which could be the very one from Mrs Dulcimer’s parlour.
Years and poverty have buried Mrs Dulcimers’s girls and we taste their grief as Madeleine later does. In the meanwhile, Joseph slowly comes to understand the desire that takes charge, might not belong to the girls.
Michele Roberts language is lush, sensual and humid and touches all the senses, including rich, sounds, colours evolving city sights.
She takes the tour of London including Covent Garden, Smithfields, Highgate Cemetery, Stew Lane and Waterloo Bridge, with the characters who walk them.
The stories are like city’s archaeological layers, describing the joy of the city and its dense human history, souls and spirits that throb in dark places.
The Walworth Beauty by Michele Roberts, Bloomsbury £16.99, 389 pages.