George, painfully shy, harmless by nature lives in a world of
dreams and imagination. Alas his fate is sealed the moment he meets Cora, hard,
cold, worldly wise and ruthless. She leads him on, manipulates the hulking
idiot (yes, George!) till his whole world falls apart, and he is destroyed. He
is ready to do anything to please and have her, but he fails dismally as the
reality is that Cora can not even stand him in any way. George even goes so far
as to attempt to rob a woman to divest her of her finery just to please Cora
but - typical of him - this ends in farcical fashion. The truth is that George
is a "prize imbecile", a loser, a sucker to the very end. It is a
pathetic, moving, powerful story. At least there are some prose-nuggets in this
work, eg " the children spotted them heads turning in their direction with
the precision of a field of corn moving in a wind”; “the prostitutes, thieves,
pimps, the touts…all moving in a steady stream, like a river of rottenness”;
“he wavered before George like weeds in a fast moving river”; “the hush of the
room, above the drone of the bees, and the rustle of the hollyhocks against the
window..” Who says Chase was not a fine writer?
A very fine review of a work of an author often dismissed as a writer of thrillers. Chase is of course highly regarded in Africa, France etc, and rightly so.
ReplyDeleteYes, a good concise review
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